By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
My great-grandmother, whom I remember well, was six years old in 1868 when the U.S. Constitution was amended to give men of color the right to vote.
As a girl, she could not expect to have that right herself. It didn’t matter that many women, both Black and white, had been leading abolitionists. They fought to have slavery abolished, and they fought to get Black men the vote, but men in the U.S. Congress didn’t consider women capable of making political decisions well enough to vote themselves.
Three decades later, when my grandmother was born, she, too, might never have that right.
Even when my mother was born, there was no guarantee, though the Constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote was in the works and was finally ratified when she was four months old.
Great-grandma Marcy, who had a lifelong active interest in politics, was 59 years old when she cast her first vote in a presidential election.
I wish citizens would consider all that, when they say they won’t vote because they don’t like either candidate, or they’ll sit this one out because they don’t agree with their candidate on a specific issue. How would they feel if they were denied the right to decide?
After almost 250 years as a republic, but only 104 years where all citizens, not just the male half, have been represented—and when the strong, intelligent women of my own lineage were left out—when it’s time to vote, I vote.
It is a privilege to pick up that pen and fill in the oval that will indicate my choice for president. Millions of people around the world will never have this opportunity, or it will be a sham opportunity, with results foreordained. I am joining fellow citizens from all over the country and beyond, all of us sharing this special right and fulfilling this responsibility. And, at least for this moment, it matters what I think! Haven’t the candidates spent countless dollars and most of their time trying to get my attention and impress me with the belief that they would be such a good president or vice president?
Besides, there’s a little piece of me that thinks, if there is an afterlife where we meet our ancestors, I wouldn’t want to run into all those tough New England Yankee women of my heritage and have to confess that I missed a chance to vote.
Great-grandma Marcy was a lifelong Republican. Her son, my grandfather, and my grandmother leaned Democratic. They marched wholeheartedly into the Democratic camp when, during the Depression in the 1930s, Grandpa was appointed postmaster of our Rhode Island village, giving him a steady job and enabling him and Grandma to support their seven children. The certificate of his appointment, framed, hung on the wall above the roll-top desk in their tiny home office, apparently signed by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself.
But Republican or Democrat, the important thing was to be informed and to vote. I remember as a child going to the polling place with my mother, standing beside her as she cast her ballot after the adults had been absorbed in watching the political conventions on TV, thinking that voting must be an important and very grown-up thing to do.
I have voted in many presidential elections. I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as a perfect candidate. As a voter, you won’t agree on every issue with any candidate. You choose the candidate whose values and principles most closely align with your own. And you vote.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net
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