A good time to be on history’s right side
Happy Primary Day! Whatever your political affiliation, today you can be a part of history.
But first, a little story: In the early part of the last century, as discussions were heating up over woman suffrage, the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage counted clubs in 161 towns whose members vowed “to leave nothing undone that might help the downfall of the suffrage party.”
This wasn’t a fringe group. Respectable men and women banded together with the sole purpose of keeping women out of the voting booths. By 1915, for example, Old Lyme’s anti-suffrage club had attracted 125 members, among them Florence Griswold, founder of the art colony who also served on her local anti-suffrage executive committee.
Organized antis had come a little late to the party. While pro-suffrage groups began to crop up after the Civil War, antis didn’t get organized until after the turn of the last century, though even before it was gavel-down on the meetings, woman-hating newspaper cartoonists and various public wags had already taken up the cause. Their most polite message was this: The hand that rocked the cradle ruled the world, and better power by proxy than craven power by political activity.
Connecticut’s role in this lost cause was significant. The anticharge was led, for a while, by Hartford-born educator Josephine Jewell Dodge, whose father, Marshall Jewell, had been Connecticut’s governor, and a supporter of women’s rights. Dodge wrote blistering essays that argued that woman suffrage was the antithesis of woman’s rights. In one essay from 1914, she cited another Connecticut education reformer, Catherine Beecher, elder sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a shining example of how women had been able to enter professions regardless of political activity. Dodge also wrote that the courts made sure women were treated fairly, which negated the need for women to enter the political realm — or so Dodge argued. In other words, women voting was superfluous to improving their lives.
Meanwhile, other Connecticut denizens such as Isabella Beecher Hooker (Catherine and Harriet’s younger half-sister), and her husband, John, were pulling on the other end of the rope, giving speeches, writing articles, and lobbying tirelessly in favor of votes for women. Last week, their Hartford home was added to the National Votes for Women Trail with a ceremony that highlighted the couples’ contributions to national suffrage. Their brick mansion, now divided into apartments, was once a hotbed of bold-faced names who at in the graceful parlor or the sloping lawn and shared ideas they would later take around the country — and world. In fact, for decades just about any famous person who came to Hartford — then home to multiple book publishers, newspapers, and members of an intellectual big league — stopped in to see the Hookers.
Subsequent scholarship around Griswold touches on her anti-suffrage work, and bemoans that for all her good qualities — and there were many — the woman sat squarely on the wrong side of history on this one.
Last week gave us some other beautiful reminders about history’s right side.
First, the U.S. Senate passed the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring Our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics — or the PACT Act — which expanded care for veterans who suffer from exposure to toxins during their time in the military, particularly around burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq and subjects such as Agent Orange for Vietnam-era vets.
Originally, the legislation was a no-brainer, and most Republican senators supported it — until, in pique over an unrelated domestic bill, some withdrew support.
What happened next was beautiful. Veterans’ groups and former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart made it their business to talk about this ridiculous withdrawal of support, and people began calling and emailing their senators. Fourteen changed their minds. Eleven didn’t. (Both Connecticut senators, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, supported the legislation throughout its passage.)
And then, in a separate vote, Kansas residents flooded the polls to say that their state constitution does, in fact, guarantee the right to an abortion. This is reliably redstate Kansas, which for a generation had been considered a conservative stronghold. What this means for other states bent on taking away this medical option for pregnant people could be stunning.
Connecticut has no such hotbutton questions on the ballot, but we can go vote in our primaries. Let’s make it a blow-out. Let’s confound the poll-watchers. From past elections, we know that women tend to vote more than do men, and older voters tend to vote more than do younger ones, so in this primary, your political party’s direction most likely will be dictated by someone like me, an older woman who wouldn’t miss a vote if her life depended on it.
I’m not saying I don’t have your best interest at heart when I vote, but are you sure you want the likes of me charting Connecticut’s future?
If you haven’t done so already, Connecticut offers Election Day registration and you can find out more here: https://bit.ly/3P3fX4V. Register. Vote. Place yourself on the right side of history. Start by voting.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.