I am a day late in noting this, but it’s nevertheless worth mentioning that Wednesday, Aug. 18, marked the 90th anniversary of the day that women in America won the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Looking back on that event with the advantage of nearly a century of hindsight, it’s still astonishing to realize that for the first 130 years of our democratically elected form of government, fully half of America’s citizens were denied the right to vote simply because they had two X chromosomes.
This is one reason why I find so humorous the belief among some people, amounting to a religion, that the “original intent” of the founding fathers who drafted the constitution must absolutely be followed in every legal decision ever made by a court.
The “original intent” of the founding fathers was to only allow white males who owned property to have the right to vote (the founding fathers’ original intent also included the legalization of slavery and the supposition that black people only counted as three-fifths of a person, but we’ll hold that discussion for later). The story of American democracy has been the gradual expansion of the right to vote to all races and sexes, regardless of their property-holding status.
As far as Georgia politics is concerned, it is quite interesting that we once had a secretary of state who tried her hardest to keep blacks and people of Latino descent from being allowed to vote. Her political goal was obvious: she was a Republican and she believed that suppressing the votes of non-caucasian persons would help elect Republican candidates.
I wonder if she ever appreciated the irony that just 90 years prior to her tenure as the state’s chief elections official, she herself would not have been allowed to vote simply because of her sex. Now that she has some free time available, she may want to consider enrolling in one of the state’s excellent community colleges and taking a survey course on American history to educate herself as to that fact.
