The longer I live, the more I realize how short history is. I was in the supermarket yesterday and at the checkout I happened to notice a special periodical celebrating the 1920s – now 100 years ago! When did that happen?
Of course, when I was a kid, the 1920s may as well have been the Stone Age. Now I’m always playing the “equidistant game.” Though I’ve been doing so for decades, I think this is the first time I’ve actually named it. It goes something like this: We are now 30 years from 1990. 30 years before 1990, it was 1960. We are now further from 1990 than 1990 was from the Kennedy assassination. I haven’t used that one before. I tend to think more about the 1940s, and how, in the 1970s, World War II must have felt like yesterday to my grandfather.
Anyway, this whole thing is prompted by the fact that today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, of course, was the women’s rights activist, who campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing a woman’s right to vote, was ratified only on August 18, 1920. Ancient history, right? That was within my grandparents’ lifetime! It wasn’t even 50 years before I was born. I am now further away from my birth date than my birth date was from the passage of the 19th Amendment. WTF???
Anthony never lived to see a woman legally vote in an official election, though she did have the satisfaction of witnessing the gradual evolution of public perception of her work. Once vilified as a dangerous radical whose ideas threatened the very institution of marriage, she was honored at the White House on the occasion of her 80th birthday.
Again, when I was a kid, it was hard for me to get my head around the continuing repercussions of slavery, when it seemed so much time had passed since the Civil War. I’m probably not saying anything new to any reflective person over a certain age, but history is so damn short, and events that appear to be long past were not really all that long ago. We are still interacting with them every day, whether we happen to be conscious of it or not.
And yet people forget so quickly, when everything is not kept continually before them. It takes only a few years for something that is accepted as common knowledge to slip off the radar of the young, who have never been exposed to it. We see it all the time, with familiar faces who have been off the public stage for only a few years. Somebody who is 13 has only the vaguest idea of what was happening when they were 3. How do you make Hitler real and present for someone who doesn’t even remember the Fonz?
Anyway, enough of my pontificating. Happy birthday, Susan B. Anthony – even if you did destroy marriage.
Also, I have never been fond of your coin.
Songs of women’s suffrage, from the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197395/
Songs of the Suffragettes:
