The vote
“I don’t know why you want to vote. You vote them in, the shit-asses do whatever they want anyway.” – Mike Mehling, circa 1940s
Tuesday was the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote, so I started asking family members if they had any stories about our female ancestors voting for the first time, presumably in 1920.
Gary’s immediate response was the above quote from his maternal grandfather, Mike Mehling (1888-1964). He certainly made no bones about his opinions, usually in German.
Gary’s mom carried on her father’s tradition by not registering to vote. If you’re on that list, she warned, you may get called for jury duty. Rita had cows to milk.
I remember voting for the first time. It was in one of these contraptions:
There was a training session beforehand, conducted by one of those over-explainers who make processes seem far more complicated than they truly are.
Still, there was a sizable lever to pull, which closed the curtain around you, for complete privacy (from the knees up, anyway). There were many little toggles to flip. When finished, simply yank the lever back in the other direction. Your ballot is cast, the curtains reopened. Thank you for voting.
Each year it seems like there’s a new way to vote. One time, it was a paper ballot you completed with a special pen then fed into a counting machine. I couldn’t help but wonder if that machine was really just a shredder.
But still, I voted.
The agitator who got it all started for women voters was Susan B. Anthony. She was a “good trouble” kind of person. She even got arrested for those troubles.
This SBA quote is my favorite; very Lincolnesque:
Susan B. Anthony received a presidential pardon this week.
My immediate reaction to the news was, “Yes, but would she want one?”
Believe it or not, I played Ms. Anthony in a school pageant. The year was 1976 and my senior year in high school was spent celebrating “The Spirit of ’76.” We overdid it. So much, in fact, that when our valedictorian started her graduation speech with, “Two hundred years ago …” the crowd groaned. Not to be rude – it was involuntary, a visceral reaction – we’d all just had enough.
The pageant was a project put together by several classmates. I only remember two things about it: Yours truly recited part of a speech by Susan B. Anthony, and a fellow thespian went off-script on a dare.
I’d never even heard of Susan B. Anthony.
The speech chosen for me to memorize was, um … really long.
We had two performances, one just for the student body and another that evening for parents. The latter went smoothly, but the dress rehearsal convocation was a bit sketchy.
First of all, this was before the internet. I know I say that a lot in these remembrances, but it’s important. Now all it takes is a few key strokes to answer questions such as, “How did Susan B. Anthony dress?” If only I’d looked her up in the library’s encyclopedia, I’d have been able to pass along to the wardrobe folks that Ms. Anthony did not a hoop skirt wear:
For whatever reason, I was given a hoop skirt to wear.
Let me just say, the rumors are true: One must be careful how one sits while wearing a hoop. There’s a certain tuck that must take place or, well … all is revealed. (Luckily, I was wearing just-in-case shorts during rehearsals when we tested the theory.)
In brief, when it was my turn to speak, I hooped my way downstage. Front and center, I dramatically recited the memorized speech. That is, until I forgot the middle section. Ugh, no prompter hissing my lines from the wings, no cue cards.
After a brief pause, while my brain frantically searched for the next line, I simply skipped to the final portion of the speech and finished with the planned finger-pointing arm thrust high in the air (you’re welcome, Lin-Manuel Miranda).
I froze in that position. Surely the guys in the booth would see that I was done and would take down the lights so I could scamper off stage. It happened eventually (the audience’s applause helped), but not before my arm started to ache a bit.
Susan B. Anthony returned to my life a few years later.
It was 1979, and my summer was spent slinging hash. Pancakes, actually. Someone in the federal government had decided it would be a good thing to honor Susan B. Anthony by producing a dollar coin with her face on it.
People hated those coins! They didn’t want the extra change to carry around, the coins got mistaken for quarters, and they didn’t work well in vending machines.
We waitresses would see what we thought was a mere quarter tip on the table, only to realize later it was a dollar. Even so, there was the daily: “Who wants to switch out a bill for this dollar coin? And who the heck is Susan B. Anthony?”
The coins were in production for just three years.
Another questionable use of the Susan B. Anthony name was this week’s pardoning.
In a nutshell, the leader of the suffrage movement voted in a no-cooties-allowed election back in 1872. Along with 14 other forbidden female voters, she was arrested and convicted. Ms. Anthony was fined $100 following a two-day trial. She never paid her fine.
All these years later, would she want to be pardoned? History tells us she was offered a pardon by President Ulysses S. Grant.
She turned it down.
Here are just a few in a series of tweets from the Susan B. Anthony Museum in Rochester, New York:
In both cases, “you can’t win for losing” comes to mind. Let’s hope so.
Oh, I still need to tell you about the other memorable bit from that Bicentennial Pageant decades ago.
On Saturday Night Live, which was only a year old at the time, the Weekend Update portion was hosted by Chevy Chase.
The opening bit was dumb, but effective:
The actor backstage who finished up the program with a voice over reading of a speech by the current president, Gerald Ford. On a “wouldn’t it be funny?” dare, she started with “Hello, I’m Gerald Ford. And you’re not.” It brought the house down. And got her in loads of trouble.
No matter how you plan to vote – and for whom, get out there and do it. Women, men, of all colors.
“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.” – Susan B. Anthony
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