At our present historical moment, women have spent more time fighting for suffrage than the amount of time we’ve actually had it. 1848 marked the start of the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States with the Seneca Falls Convention. It took until 1920 to finally gain the right to vote.
With election season in the air, taking a moment to consider the magnitude of courage, labor and suffering women faced in order to ascertain suffrage is chilling. Nearly 200 years of relentless ambition passed, and now we live in a political moment where the necessity of the women’s vote has become indisputable.
If you are someone who finds that their vote “doesn’t” matter,” I can assure you it does.
Unfortunately, eligible female voters between the ages of 18 and 24 have the lowest percentage of voter turnout among any other age group of women. Only 43% cast their ballots in the 2016 election year. To break it down, 49.2 million women ages 18 to 24 voted, when over double this amount could have voted.
What’s more, to say that your vote as one person doesn’t count undermines the value of your vote as a piece of a larger picture. Suffragette Alice Paul considered it “sort of a mosaic” in which “each of us puts in a little stone, and then you get the great mosaic at the end.” While this comparison holds true, we can look at the 2017 Alabama Senate election to offer a more concrete example of the value of female voter turnout.
In November of 2017, nine women stepped forward and accused Republican Candidate, Roy Moore, of sexual misconduct. Of these women, three accused Moore of sexual assault, two of which occurred in adolescence.
It was thanks to women of color, however, that this election for the Senate seat was not granted to a sexual predator. 98% of black female voters chose Doug Jones, effectively swaying this election Democratically for the first time in 25 years. If not for these women, problematic systematic oppressions would have prevailed. Nonetheless, this election was extremely close, with Jones winning by 1.5% or 20,715 votes. If this small portion of people had decided to stay in on election day, a sexual predator like Roy Moore could have gained a seat in the Senate.
The impact of high voter turnout is, however, not the only reason women should be turning up at the ballot box. Voting allows us to generate change that is essential to our futures, our livelihood, our sense of agency, and even our bodily autonomy. To take two minutes of your day to vote could create waves of change for generations to come. In order to make a mosaic that benefits women as much as it does men, we need to place our pebble by casting our votes as individuals. Only then, as a collective, can we create something greater – the beautiful picture of change.
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