Why did I invite a few friends to my house recently to write postcards to US Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn asking them to vote against a piece of legislation that will make it harder for millions of women to vote? Because I couldn't think of a good reason not to. I had the postcards; my mother left me several hundred blank postcards when she died last year. She left me a whole lot of stamps too, including ones she bought to commemorate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and civil rights activist John Lewis. But it wasn't just that I had the right stuff.
I used to teach my fifth graders about the women's suffrage movement. We learned about people like Frederick Douglass, one of the few men willing to sign the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. We learned about Lucy Stone, who in 1855 married the brother of the first woman to graduate from a medical school in the United States in a ceremony that intentionally omitted from the vows the part about obeying the husband. We learned about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and suffrage leader whose 1866 speech "We Are All Bound Up Together" argued that the fight for women's rights should not be defined by race. We learned about the Silent Sentinels, women like Lucy Burns, Alice Paul, and Dorothy Day who were arrested and beaten for having the temerity to protest in front of the White House on behalf of women's suffrage in 1917. And we learned about people like Fannie Lou Hamer, who lost her job and her home because she tried to register to vote in 1962 and was later beaten almost to death for leading a voter registration effort. What we did was learn about people I had mostly never heard of growing up, people who not only risked their reputations and often their lives for the right to vote but also spent their lifetimes working for something that many of them never lived to see.
When I learned about the ironically named SAVE Act, I thought about all those people we used to talk about in my class, about how we are the beneficiaries of their work, and about how just doing nothing betrayed their legacies. My late mother didn't just collect postcards and stamps; her refrigerator (she called it the ice box, much to the consternation of my children) was adorned with quotations she liked. This one, often attributed to Edward Everett Hale, was among her favorites: "I am only one; but I am still one. I cannot do everything; but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do."
I don't have the courage that Alice Paul and Fannie Lou Hamer had. But I do have a voice. Using it is the whole point.