Clinton a belated gift for suffragettes
Born before women could vote, these 100-year-olds want Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to make history. Petula Dvorak reports.
On her 100th birthday, Evangeline Paredes got a gift she never imagined she’d receive.
‘‘It was the best gift you could get a woman. It was history,’’ said Paredes, who had a tough time staying awake for all the convention coverage Wednesday night, what with the 100th birthday party rager she had earlier that day in the District of Columbia.
But she was awake for the important part – the historic one.
‘‘I watched that moment Hillary made it. When it was official. Never, I never imagined I would see it,’’ said Paredes, who was born in Brooklyn at a time when American women didn’t have the right to vote.
‘‘For most of my life, women were treated as second-class citizens,’’ she said. ‘‘With Hillary, she’s been around, she’s been down, she’s been up. Mother. Senator. Secretary of state. She’s had it all. And she will show we don’t need a man to do that job.’’
This may be the last presidential election for the generation of women born into a world without female suffrage. It wasn’t until 1920 that the Constitution was amended to grant women the right to vote.
So for any woman 96 or older, Hillary Clinton’s ascension as the Democratic nominee is a landmark.
On Wednesday, the country watched Jerry Emmett, 102, cast the Arizona delegation’s 34 votes for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.
Emmett, a lifelong political activist, said she, too, never thought she’d see a woman with a real shot at the presidency.
The same is true for Gladys Butler, a 100-year-old African- American woman who lives in southeast Washington. In 2008, Butler was amazed – and elated – to cast her ballot for Barack Obama and see a black man win the presidency.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton formally accepted the Democratic nomination, giving Butler a chance to watch history unfold again.
‘‘I sure hope she makes it in. We have had change, but there are still some things to get done that President Obama couldn’t get done,’’ she said. ‘‘I hope I make it to Election Day.’’
So does Paredes, who voted for Clinton in the primary and plans to vote for her in November. She’s always voted. Every cycle, every election, across party lines, from the time she was 18 years old, she said.
Paredes was very young, but she remembers her mother talking about that first time she voted after the 19th Amendment was passed.
It was a hard-fought right. During the big suffragette parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913, the marchers were shouted down, insulted and even attacked – by both anti-suffrage onlookers and the police who were supposed to protect them.
By the time about 5000 women marched from the Capitol to the Treasury building, about 300 people were injured and about 100 of those had to be hospitalised.
Congressional hearings were held after the march looking into the lack of police protection for the women, who were spat on, tripped, shoved and kicked while police did nothing.
‘‘There would be nothing like this happen if you would stay at home,’’ one officer told a woman after she had been attacked, according to congressional testimony.
Horrendous that it took that long to give women the right to vote and, with all our sense of awe and wonder this week, equally appalling that it took nearly another century to get a woman at the top of the big ticket. And the haters are still at it, with all sorts of misogynistic put-downs and paraphernalia aimed at Clinton.
Centenarians such as Paredes – who spent a lifetime being told what they couldn’t do – know the road will never be an easy one for women.
‘‘She’s going to have a hard road to travel with the guys,’’ she said.
And Paredes would know. She worked as a diplomatic secretary for the president of the Philippines, then as a military secretary at the Pentagon for 34 years.
Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, she worked with all of them. And she did that while raising a child.
‘‘I could never cook, and I never learned to keep house very well,’’ she said. ‘‘But my shorthand was 200. And my typing was 200 words a minute. And my son, he was very advanced at a young age.’’ He’s 64 now and buys her groceries.
But usually, it’s Paredes who is taking care of others.
She is an active volunteer at the local veteran’s hospital in Southeast Washington, where she puts together care packages and visits patients in their rooms.
They threw her a birthday party there on Wednesday, with a chocolate and vanilla cake and balloons bobbing overhead.
‘‘I didn’t think I’d make it this long,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t think a woman could make it this far. It was a good day.’’