When I was a kid, I remember, everything seemed like ancient history. Even in my teens, I looked upon the early 20th century as if it were another world, albeit a ceaselessly fascinating one. Now that I’m in my 50s, it astonishes me that someone my age could go to the movies in 1974, to see “Blazing Saddles,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” or “Chinatown,” and the year of his or her birth would have been the year that women in this country were first legally permitted to vote.
In another eight years, we will be as far away from 1974 as 1974 was from the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Furthermore, if we scroll back another 54 years from 1920, we arrive at 1866 – one year after the passage of the 13th Amendment, making slavery illegal in the United States.
Whaaaaaaaaaat?? What kind of barbarism is this? And how young a country are we? Small wonder it’s been such an uphill battle for women and minorities. It’s only yesterday that anyone was acknowledged to have any rights!
In this week of the Democratic National Convention and the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment (on August 18, 1920), legalizing a woman’s right to vote, and with the Republican National Convention right around the corner, politics is everywhere. It’s one of my least favorite subjects on the planet, but sadly we now live in a world where it must be in the forefront of our consciousness always. Perhaps it always has been the case, and I was simply ignorant, albeit blissfully so.
Here’s an article on music in the women’s suffrage movement in America:
“Songs of the Suffragettes”:
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president – in 1872! The year before, Woodhull addressed Congress (the first woman ever to do so) and argued that the 14th and 15th Amendments already implicitly grant a woman’s right to vote. Essentially, she said, as an American citizen, her right to cast a ballot was protected. The committee overwhelmingly saw it otherwise. Woodhull was an indomitable force. She never stopped pushing for what she believed, and she lived to see women’s suffrage pass into law. She died in 1927, at the age of 88.
Woodhull is the subject of an opera, “Mrs. President,” by Victoria Bond:
Act I
Act II
Here’s a recent production of Virgil Thomson’s Susan B. Anthony opera, “The Mother of Us All,” on a libretto by Gertrude Stein:
Finally, “Musical Activism in the American Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1900-1920”:
We should be proud of how far we have come as a nation, but not be too arrogant or complacent. The “modern era” has been a short one, and we still have a long way to grow.