Ninety-six years ago today, this happened:
The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. Until the 1910s, most states disenfranchised women. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. It effectively overruled Minor v. Happersett, in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give women the right to vote.
Many things have shaped who I am politically, but nothing has ever had more of an impact on me than reading Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (If you haven’t read that book, I command you to do so now! The PBS documentary was good, but the book is astounding.)
I was, very fittingly, 19 years old when I read that book and, put very simply, it radicalized me. The person who turned the first page of that book was a shifty, directionless, disaffected, and hopeless young lady. The person who clung to very last word of the very last page was a focused, passionate, dedicated woman. It would take several posts to describe how drastically different the 20 year old me was from the 18 year old me, and I like to think that it’s pretty damn cool that it was my nineteenth year when I learned about the nineteenth amendment and shifted from dogmatic and confusing Idaho political mainstream to the far left.
More on that after the fold but first, a word from our sponsors!
Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!