[Day 11] Voting
Two years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshiped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, comparing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer through.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
It's 2008 and Hillary Rodham Clinton is, as I write this, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S. Yet, even as this is happening, women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
It's 2008 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Voting
In 1920, the United States passed the 19th amendment to the Constitution, which reads "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." In doing so, they were joining countries such as New Zealand, Australia, and Norway in finally granting women the ability to have a political voice in their communities and country. In the nearly hundred years since that amendment was passed, women have been given suffrage in nearly every country in the world, with Qatar being the most recent. Only a handful of countries currently deny or restrict a woman's right to participate in elections.
There are certainly people who take this right for granted, and there are those who don't choose to exercise it. Maybe they don't know that women's votes were pivotal in shifting control of the US Senate to the Democratic Party in 2006, that in every election since 1980, women have voted in higher numbers than men, and that they are actively courted by every would-be politician. Organizations like Women's Voices, Women Vote are key in reaching the women who don't register, who don't vote, who don't utilize this tool in shaping their worlds. They team up with groups like Rock the Vote and Working Assets to make it easy to register to vote, they provide statistics and research on the importance of women as a demographic, and they work with activists to turn, in their words, "uninvolved women into active voters who are influencing debate." Their work is especially vital in election years, like this one.
If you live in the United States, are over the age of 18, and have not yet registered to vote, you can easily do so here. As Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly says, "The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world." Get out there. Change the world.