We asked the question and Aunt Susan says she’s annoyed because there’s a lot of catchup work to be done in terms of learning our own history. What’s the problem? The following academic journal poses an answer.

“Women’s suffrage has been especially likely to suffer indifference and neglect except when its absence provides further justification for the targeting of suspect cultures, as with today’s western criticism of Saudi Arabia. For the most part, it is trivialized as an inevitable and peaceful concession. That woman suffrage represents one of the great extensions to democracy in the modern world, that it is frequently fiercely opposed, and that women’s exclusion from power persists needs to be far more widely appreciated.

“The franchise and other forms of meaningful participation in government are the fruits of historic struggles against tyranny and privilege. They promise peaceful ways to confront longstanding inequities of gender, class, race, religion, sexuality, and region. While their visions were regularly incomplete, the women and men who devoted and sometimes lost their lives in struggles against slavery, apartheid, the caste system, the male franchise, and special privilege in general, expanded hopes for inclusion and equality.”

Susan B. Anthony follows issues on the internet. The above quote is from an excellent Canadian web site: womensuffrage.org published by the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia.

So take heart, Aunt Susan. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter says the following about the anniversary of the 19th amendment:  “We have come too far, and too many women have fought, struggled and sacrificed for the rights we now enjoy. We have an obligation and a responsibility to live up to their legacy and to preserve it for future generations of women.” See the article in an upstate New York paper.