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Why I Vote

Joy's Book Blog Posted on by

I saw this event on Crazy QuiltEdi: Why I Vote. It’s hosted by Chasing Ray who is updating a compilation post through election day: Why I Vote Round-Up. 

Grandmother Hoover was born in 1894. Grandma Weese was born in 1898. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed in 1920, in time for women to vote in the election of Warren G. Harding for President of the United States.

I vote because when my grandmothers were growing up, women couldn’t vote. I asked Grandma Weese about it once. She was apparently a bit of a rabble-rouser  — “I told them at the high school that I didn’t know what made men think they were so smart.”

I vote because it wasn’t that long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to vote.

Signature of Joy Weese Moll

Comments

Why I Vote — 14 Comments

  1. I know what you mean. I always feel the weight of history when I’m in the poll booth, and it makes me all misty-eyed and patriotic and proud. 🙂

    • Thanks! I hadn’t heard of Iron Jawed Angels — I just put it in our Netflix queue.

  7. Precisely the same reason I do, Joy. My grandmother would be so disappointed if I didn’t. My daughters always vote because they know how much it means to me. So you see it isn’t that I don’t think it is important myself, it just has even more meaning when it is linked to a lineage. Civic and familial responsibility.

  8. Wow. I always tell my kids, as I drag them to the polls with me, that men have died so that I can vote. I never thought about my grandmother, or hers, and how women just a few generations back didn’t have this right. Thanks for a quick, but powerful reminder!

  9. Pingback:It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? | Joy's Book Blog

  10. Yes, exactly. And I’ve been really proud that this is the first election that my dad has voted in. He just received his US citizenship two years ago (he’s been living here [legally] for 20 years as he’s originally Canadian). Voting is certainly a privilege that I won’t take for granted!

  11. What a great story, Joy. Makes me wish I had talked with my great grandmothers who came from Poland and Italy respectively in the late 1800s. I wonder what perspectives from the “old country” they brought in those early days.

  12. It’s hard to imagine not being able to vote, but I know how hard women fought to get that right. I grew up thinking every vote counts despite what we are told.

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