1870- Black men get the right to vote. Granted not many did because they feared for their lives, but they got the right to vote with very little effort on their part.
1920- FIFTY years later! Women earn the right to vote, after a long and hard struggle.
It seems that this year in the Democratic primary election history is repeating itself.
My unofficial official prediction is that Obama will win the primary (which after the results of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries yesterday is looking much more likely) not because he is the "best" candidate for president, but because the US will elect a black man as president first before they will ever elect a woman to be president.
It kind of ruffles my feathers and fluffs my muffins that the presidential race is more of a competition between race and gender, than it is over policies and issues.
I have to admit that if Clinton drops out I will be sad, not because I necessarily want her to be president, but because it means that we might just have to wait fifty more years till some qualified and hard working woman gets her chance. While I don't agree with all of Hillary Clinton's policies, I do respect her fighting spirit. I hope she fights it out to the end because I think the US needs a woman president. It probably will not be Hillary Clinton, but somewhere there is a little 10 year-old girl who fifty years from now might finish what she began.
6 years ago
3 comments:
You continually make me think about things differently than I would if I did not read your blog ")
Love,
Mommy T.
Many would argue that black men got the right to vote only after suffering the bloodiest war in history with thousands of men being maimed, mutilated, tortured and killed, not to mention suffering hundreds of years of slavery. In fact, many would argue that women got the right to vote, fifty years later, after
some marches and protests but with very little effort on their part. Further, it was largely the abolitionist cause that brought about the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Fredrick Douglas were brought together initially for the abolitionist movement.
I also disagree strongly that this election is a competition between race and gender. I'm convinced that, for the first time in history, very few of the people who care about the primary care at all whether someone is black or a woman. While policy differences may be slight, the one glaring difference is significant, and reflects moral fiber. Moreover, it has become a study in differences in method, i.e. eloquence, rhetoric, and good-government eggheadism vs. shameless populism, flagrant pandering, and character assassination.
Clinton has been using attack by association, pandering, and, to use her own words, "throwing the kitchen sink" at Obama (which doesn't have an apostrophe). This is a tragedy because her Senate record (except for the glaring vote for the war) is pretty similar to Obama's record, and she has proven a capable legislator. Obama, too, has been very capable legislatively both in Washington and Illinois.
In spite of all the immense challenges the next president will face, the moral imperative of this election is as an admonition of the government against the war. The only significant voting difference between Clinton and Obama was in voting for the war. Clinton voted like the vast majority of the Senate to support the war. Obama, even as a freshman senator had the foresight and conviction to vote against the war when it was extremely unpopular to do so.
I think Nathan brings up a GREAT point about the struggles that blacks had to go through to get the right to vote, let alone be free. And he is right that the abolistionist and suffarage movements were VERY intertwined, and that one opened up the way to the other.
If O'bama gets the nomination he will still have a long hard battle to fight (hopefully not as bloody as the first one) and it will cause the US population to consider some hard moral and ethical questions.
My main point is that history IS repeating itself and that BOTH blacks and women have had to struggle to get equal opportunities and rights. But historically black men have gotten the opportunities sooner than white women. I'm not trying to make a moral judgment on that, but just saying it is interesting and that I will be REALLY intrigued to see where this election goes!
PS. When I was thinking about women's struggles I was mainly thinking about Alice Paul and the National Women's Party and the struggles they went through. There is a GREAT movie about them called "Iron Jawed Angels" if you are interested.
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