Recalling the women who fought for the vote

'I wanted to vote. I was anxious. It was a privilege."

So recalls my mother about her first vote in a presidential election.

The year was 1944, the height of World War II, and incumbent Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was seeking the unprecedented fourth term that he did win.

Since casting that first ballot my mother has voted 17 more times in presidential elections and, God willing, she will vote again in 2012. All these years later her logic for picking candidates hasn't changed.

"I've always voted for the person, not the party," she says. "I pick the person who I think can do the job."

My mother was born in June of 1920. Two months later women won the right to vote with the approval of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. My mother's mother would have been 30 years old that summer she gave birth to her third daughter. Up to that time her country had not provided her the full rights and privileges spelled out in the U.S. Constitution.

Fifty years earlier, in 1870, the 15th Amendment giving black men the vote had been ratified, stating the right of citizens to vote "shall not be denied or abridged ... on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

But women of all races had to wait five more decades before they, too, received full recognition as citizens.

I don't know if my grandmother cast a ballot in 1920, when Republican Warren Harding beat Democratic opponent James M. Cox, but I bet the feisty, white-haired matriarch that I remember did.

Last week, as the nation marked the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, I spent time reading historical accounts of the epic struggle suffragettes undertook. Their amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1878, did not receive ratification until Aug. 18, 1920. In the 42 intervening years supporters organized, petitioned, paraded and picketed. Some mounted legal challenges, while others tried at the state level to pass suffrage acts.

All the while opponents fought the effort and used every tactic they could to thwart its passage. And even when women won the right to vote, male candidates complained the ladies would vote as a block and skew elections. In short order, however, the men realized that women had minds of their own.

Today, women comprise more than half of all the registered voters in the U.S., helping not only to seat presidents, but to shape public policy and decisions by casting ballots in state and local elections, and weighing in on referendums.

And the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential contest further solidified the place of women and the female constituency in the big picture of national politics.

But even with each new political milestone for women, it's hard to fathom all these decades later that women like my grandmother, who held a job and kept a home and would be widowed before the start of the Great Depression in 1929, were so long denied the right to vote. It just seems terribly unfair, and even more so because many of the suffragettes who agitated to pass the 19th Amendment didn't live long enough to see their dream realized.

Today, most Americans, women and men, take their right to vote for granted because they've always had it. But a look back in history illustrates just how precious a right it is. The right to vote should be valued, and nurtured carefully.

Ann Baldelli is associate editorial page editor.