August 18, 2024: The 104th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

I post this every couple of years on my social media. Maybe every 4 years. Not likely a coincidence.

My mom was 3 years old when women gained the right to vote. She never missed a chance to vote. She dragged me along to stand in line with her after work. I never got to go into the voting booth, but was told to wait outside the curtain. The right to vote was not something to be taken lightly.

It was important.

Private.

Thoughtful.

My family talked a lot about politics, always. I remember discussions (and some political buttons at our house) when I was a Kindergartener and JFK was running against Nixon.

The year that LBJ ran for President, my parents feared that Barry Goldwater would ramp things up in Vietnam. Just today, I put two and two together; my brother was coming of age for the draft the very next year. Johnson and Goldwater were high stakes candidates for my family. Of course my mom held the opinion that Lady Bird Johnson coveted White House weddings for daughters Lucy and Lynda.

Later, Nixon came down the pike again. By then I saw that my mom was a pacifist. She had seen what war did to my dad, She saw, as we all did on the nightly news, images of young American men belly crawling through the jungles of SE Asia. Nixon claimed to have a “secret plan to end the war” when he ran for his second term in 1972; this was the year that my own generation was coming of age for the draft. There was no secret plan of course, and Nixon didn’t last. He resigned on my 19th birthday.

And so it goes.

Every political year seems more vicious than the year before. More important. More personal. These women knew, over 100 years ago, that “the personal is political.”