My Marvie took voting seriously
When Marvie K. Marrs was born in 1911 in northwest Arkansas, women’s suffrage was still almost a decade away.
People who opposed women voting made all kinds of worrisome claims. They said politics were vulgar and beneath women. If you supported women voting, the saying went, you were against the family. The arguments dripped with nonsense.
Modern-day efforts that seek to limit voting access are no different. This country began by extending the right to vote strictly to white property-owning men over the age of 21, and each time the voting pool is expanded, the same tired arguments get dragged out and repurposed. You can get lost in the weeds talking about the filibuster and the voting rights bills that languish in Washington. It’s always a good time to talk about the filibuster, but never lose sight of the fact that it’s in our American DNA to shrink the door to the voting booth.
These days, the nonsense is coming from Republicans and a scattered few DINOs. Elected Republican leaders spend energy making voting less accessible, and that goes double for people who have been historically disenfranchised.
This march backward won’t return us to a time when the Republicans stood for something. As conservative commentators are quick to remind us, it wasn’t the Democratic Party that ended slavery, and it certainly wasn’t the Democratic Party that sought to enfranchise the people who had been enslaved. It was the party of Lincoln, a moniker you know is lost to the ages when someone like Mitch McConnell is the standard bearer.
Last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell took a social media spanking when he said Black Americans vote “in just as high a percentage as Americans,” because, you know, Black Americans aren’t quite … American? He apologized, but it wasn’t a slip of the tongue. The Kentucky senator’s long march of obstructionism when it comes to voting rights is welldocumented, so Mitch, please.
Put his name alongside the members of the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, whose members argued that voting took a physical toll on women, and such a toll might prevent pregnancies. One U.S. senator from Connecticut intent to keeping women from voting suggested they “go home and knit bandages and pick lint.”
The impetus for blocking voters rests on false allegations of voter fraud. Members of the GOP have even discussed appointing a special police force to ferret out that fraud, which shouldn’t take long. Those allegations are as much of a lie as was the lie about voting rendering women infertile. The Brennan Center for Justice says that even in the case of mailin ballots — a method that both increases the likelihood of voting and is increasingly popular — incidences of fraud are extremely rare.
Also from that center, any attempts at voter suppression is felt most keenly in communities of color, whether that’s strict voter ID laws or fewer polling places that make for longer lines come Election Day.
If you don’t see a pattern here, you aren’t trying very hard. Activists such as Stacey Abrams do the unthinkable and flip Georgia blue , a broad coalition unseats the least qualified person ever to serve as U.S. president, and ghosts of the anti-suffrage folks float out of their graves and start their chants. They’ve moved on from “Women are too delicate to vote” to “Voter fraud!” And “The Democrats are rewriting the rules!”
The words to the chant almost don’t matter. What matters is sore losers give the lies traction, and off we go.
It took hardworking women in two separate Arkansas Woman Suffrage Associations willing to lobby, speak in public and get arrested, but in 1920, the state became the 12th in the nation to ratify suffrage. (Connecticut dragged in at No. 37, more than a year later, when the 19th Amendment was already a part of the Constitution.)
I do not know when Marvie started noticing politics. I suspect it was early. She went to a oneroom schoolhouse until eighth grade, because that was as far as public schooling went in her part of the state. Her formal education stopped, but the family talked politics, read newspapers and expected everyone to participate in the arguments.
Consequently, Marvie took voting seriously all her 91 years. She studied candidates and issues, and she never missed an election. In fact, you could find a no more committed citizen than my grandmother. I’ve often wondered if maybe she wasn’t born a few years too soon. What might she have been in today’s world?
More important, what might the world have been had generations of Marvies had a say? That gets lost in the discussion, too. All those people from whom today’s antidemocracy crowd want to take the right to vote? Their vote is inevitable. Their voices will be heard, and we will be better off for it.
And the anti-democracy crowd’s bleating efforts and ignorant arguments? Those will be recorded, remembered and mocked.
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 a distinguished lecturer at University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.