I spent time this past weekend at the state board meeting
for the League of Women Voters of
Vision draft:
informed, engaged voters; effective, responsive government.
Values listed: non-partisan, respectful, fact-based,
trusted, persistent.
We will need to be persistent indeed if we hope to realize
the vision. Only informed, engaged voters will make possible an effective,
responsive government. Only an effective, responsive government will create
space and motivation for informed, engaged voters. It’s a chicken and egg sort
of construct. And both chicken and egg are in very bad health.
This week was the 100th anniversary of a parade in Chicago
asking the Republican party to include a plank supporting women’s right to
vote.
In spite of a heavy storm, over 5,000 women showed up to
march in the rain, while inside the convention hall, a group of anti-suffrage
women testified that women did NOT want the right to vote. According to a
Chicago paper:
As if timed to the instant, through the doors of the hall came the drenched and bedraggled marchers for suffrage. They pushed up to the platform, they massed down below, they scattered out over the hall and still they came pouring through the doors…as the shock of surprise yielded, several of [the delegates] on the platform smiled in understanding amusement, as if the incongruity of that outworn charge had at last been comprehended.
That change was the fruit of over a century of work led by a
persistent, passionate, very brave band of women.
The gathering in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 is often
listed as the start of the suffrage movement, but read the biography of
Lucretia Coffin Mott and it’s clear the work began decades before.
As a young teacher at a Quaker boarding school in New York,
she learned that the fee "for the education of girls was the same as that for
boys.” Yet, “when they became teachers, women received but half as much as men
for their services.”
“The injustice of this was so apparent," Mott recalled in an autobiographical sketch, "that I early resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed."
Married at 18 in 1811, Mott became a Quaker minister in
1821 and spoke often and passionately about the systemic immorality of
slavery. When shut out of the American Anti-Slavery Society by white Christian
men, she helped found the Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, one of the first
racially mixed organizations in the country.
While organizing to end slavery, the group also worked to
build literacy and leadership skills in black communities, provided shelter to
runaway slaves and raised funds to improve living conditions for impoverished
black families.
That work was done under the constant threat of violence
from white males attempting to silence them.
Mott's persistence awes me. Her courage inspires me.
I’ve posted before about my work for redistricting reform in
Pennsylvania. We had a setback this week, as the Government Reform Caucus
decided not to endorse the bills we’re supporting. Pennsylvania politics as usual.
The next day I had a long conversation with an older man who
wanted to make clear change is not legislatively possible: “The Republicans
have had that legislature LOCKED DOWN for fifty years.”
He repeated the phrase
“locked down" with gusto multiple times: it’s locked down, it won’t change, and
any Republican who votes for reform is committing political suicide.
Maybe so, but at last count the bills we endorse had 13
Republican co-sponsors.
And as I reminded him cheerfully: I’m part of the League of
Women Voters. We don’t think change is easy, but we tend to be persistent.
Even so, I find myself marveling at the persistence and
sacrifice of Lucretia Mott. She did not like politics, based as it inevitably
is on moral compromise. Yet she saw the
connections among the issues that concerned her: freedom, literacy, peace,
alleviation of need.
She was 47 when she was forced to sit – in silence - in a
separate women’s section at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. 55
when she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized their own women’s rights convention
at Seneca Falls in 1848.
She was 71 in 1864 when she helped found Swarthmore College,
one of the first coeducational colleges in the country. She was 73 in 1866 when
she helped organize and became the first president of the American Equal Rights
Association, formed “to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens,
especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex."
She was 87 when she died in 1880, three decades before women
finally received the right to vote.
Next weekend I’ll be attending the national League of Women
Voters Convention in Washington, DC. On Saturday morning I’ll be leading a
caucus on building coalitions and finding allies for redistricting reform.
Reading through the history of the work is a little
discouraging. Lots of names. Lots of bills. Only a few states where real change has been accomplished.
In his farewell speech in 1989, Ronald Reagan said that “high on his agenda” would be “talking up the need to do something about
political gerrymandering. This is the practice of rigging the boundaries of congressional
districts. It is the greatest single blot on the integrity of our nation’s
electoral system, and it’s high time we did something about it.”
The League of Women Voters, in states across the country,
has been working on this since at least 1990. That’s three rounds of
redistricting ago. If the practice was a
blot on the integrity of the electoral system back in 1989, it’s now a
spreading, smothering stain.
With the
constant improvement of mapping systems, the fine-tuning of data mining and the
millions of dollars invested by both parties in capturing state legislatures,
gerrymandering has made competitive elections almost impossible and has
eliminated real choice at almost every level.
Reform coalitions have come and gone as invisible funding sources
co-opt good intentions and inevitable discouragement saps energy and
interest.
Even so, there are redistricting reform coalitions in more
than a dozen states. I’m hoping to meet the leaders during my time in DC.
We’ll be voting at the convention on a new redistricting
position, created by a national task force that has studied the problem,
researched solutions and drafted recommendations.
The position recommends an end to the conflict of interest
that allows politicians to draw their own maps. It endorses adoption of
independent commissions with strong standards for transparency, public input,
fairly drawn lines.
I’m sure it will pass with strong support.
At the same time, I don’t envision anyone marching in the
streets. Redistricting reform is a complicated issue and most Americans have
trouble focusing past the first bullet point.
Somehow Lucretia Mott was able to make the connections
clear: faith in God, confidence in the equality of all, reverence for life,
sacrificial hospitality, literacy, voting rights, a longing for peace.
We are fractured, distracted, easily swayed by sound bites
and simplistic answers.
Captive to an entrenched system that offers us little choice
and pays little attention to the real needs, hopes and dreams of the average
citizen.
In Pennsylvania, we have crowded jails, crumbling roads,
immigrant families held in substandard detention facilities. We have the two
most underfunded school systems and the most inequitable school funding
structure in the country, outrageous property taxes, overlapping jurisdictions,
a bloated, expensive government that accomplishes little and captures national
attention for its incompetence and corruption.
Not long after the convention in Seneca Falls, Mott wrote: "Any great change must expect opposition, because it shakes
the very foundation of privilege."
We are in a time of great change, and it’s hard to say where
that change will lead.
As I worked on this post, I heard the sad news: fifty dead
in Orlando.
The sixteenth time our current President has addressed the
press to speak of a mass shooting.
Our electoral systems themselves make it less and less
possible to come to agreement on issues like guns, immigration, taxes, war.
Anger feeds anger; hate breeds hate.
Violence encourages greater violence.
From where I sit today, it’s hard to say.
