When it comes to our country’s semiquincentennial, I have to look at the past for reasons to celebrate.
Life in these United States looks bleak and uncertain, especially for people Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers have in their cross-hairs. And as a woman, I’m part of the largest but probably least discussed and least unified group.
The Trump/Project 2025 regime is waging a multipronged war on my gender. I’ll get into its various attacks in another column, but the most immediate one involves placing more obstacles on some women’s right to vote.
Trump is playing all kinds of hardball with the Senate, which at least for now lacks the votes to pass the SAVE America (for him and his cronies) Act, whose provisions include making voting much harder for married women who’ve taken their husbands’ last names (as I have).
You’d think this Christofascist crowd would reward a woman for doing that. Instead, they’re advocating a system where only one member of each household gets to vote, and we all know who that would be.
But on a more uplifting note, here’s a look at Pennsylvania in 1915, when suffragists were focusing their efforts on changing the state constitution.
An amendment was on the ballot in November. To drum up votes from the all-male electorate, they presented their case on a 4½ month tour that covered nearly all 67 counties. (Mine – Schuylkill – was one of three where they apparently didn’t stop.)
The organizers drew huge crowds by turning what might have been routine political rallies into community festivals.
The main attraction was a bronze replica of the Liberty Bell, which differed only slightly from the original: It wasn’t cracked, and it contained an additional engraved directive to “establish justice.”
And until the 19th Amendment was ratified five years later, its clapper was chained so that it couldn’t ring.
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I first learned about this at a program that Justice Bell Foundation Executive Director Amanda Owen presented at the Schuylkill County Historical Society, but I found out more by interviewing her and reading her book, “The Justice Bell: Tracing the Journey of a Forgotten Symbol.”
It’s so easy to overlook how costly, difficult and unusual this effort was at a time when ladies were expected to tend to their families rather than speak about controversial issues in mixed company.
The campaign was the brainchild of Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger, a 61-year-old widow from Chester County who spent $4,000 (about $130,000 today) on the bell and a vehicle to transport it.
To cover other expenses, the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association raised another $78,698 (about $2.6 million), mostly from small donors. Members provided meals and overnight lodging when the tour reached them.
Despite painstaking planning, the trips weren’t always fun. Stifling heat alternated with heavy rainfall. Muddy roads and breakdowns caused delays. Despite all that, these activists persevered and put on a series of exciting events that, thanks to efforts by publicists and coordination with local groups, were highly anticipated.
When the bell and its convoy arrived, children would march, play musical instruments and sing patriotic songs. Experienced orators held the townspeople’s attention by focusing on issues that were important to each community.
In November, 53.4% of the 826,382 voters rejected the amendment, but considering that all of them were men, that doesn’t seem too bad. And as Owen noted, the Justice Bell tour “accomplished a lot of things that bore fruit much later.”
If the Pennsylvania Legislature is any indication, public sentiment here had changed by June 1919, when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. That same month, it was ratified by 84% of the state Senate and 78% of the House.
Compare that with the votes for the state amendment, which had to pass in two consecutive sessions before getting on the ballot. The House had approved it by 65% in both 1913 and 1915, while “yes” votes from the Senate increased to 77% from 54% in that time.
But while some of these male lawmakers probably supported women’s suffrage, others stated that they only voted for the amendment to give the public a chance to reject it.
The Justice Bell suffragists are one group out of many that waged long and hard fights for a right that too many of us now take for granted.
They had an advantage because there was tremendous interest in the Liberty Bell, which itself was on a cross-country trip from Philadelphia to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. But they also prepared for and promoted each of their stops and made sure to entertain as well as enlighten the people who turned out for them.
Now women’s rights advocates face some of the same challenges that the suffragists did. We have men mocking and demonizing feminism and women trying to gain favor from them by echoing their sexist rhetoric. And self-proclaimed experts of both genders tell us that women are happiest when we’re not worrying our heads over much beyond our homes.
But now we’re in the unthinkable position of protecting a right that’s more than a century old. And we’ll need the same outreach, cooperation, creativity, organizational skills, strategizing and persistence that the Justice Bell suffragists showed.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
Image: The Harris & Ewing, Inc. Collection of photographic negatives. Washington DC.
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