It is not often that we can step into the past. Time machines notwithstanding it is difficult to extract ourselves from the present and experience what it was like a hundred years ago. The movie Suffragette depicts those events around women being granted the right to vote, in a way that my mother could never quite impart on me. She tried.
"It is important that you vote!! Really, women worked hard to win it and you need to value participating in government."
Sure, Mom.
From the vantage point of my cushy armchair in 2020, it is beyond my ken how the men in the beginning of the last century could so tenaciously preclude women from such a fundamental act of citizenship. It was heartbreaking. Bone breaking. Marriage breaking. Men erupted into viciousness, while suggesting that women were too emotional for such a responsibility. Iron Jawed Angels is another graphic movie, in which the suffragettes were force fed while on a hunger strike, in yet another grab for power. Not only could women not vote, they could not be upset about it either.
I wish I could assure my mother that come November, her daughter will not throw away the voice that was so hard earned. I think she would be pleased.
Love, Lori Odhner
