Women weren’t “given” the right to vote.

Our great-grandmothers and grandmothers clawed it for us from the Patriarchy, one beating after another, one force feeding after another, one terrified night in a jail cell after another.  One wife threatening to tell what she knew, to never sleep with him again, to leave.  One mother guilt tripping her son, one sister calling in the childhood favor, one mistress swearing she’d go to the papers, one farmwife writing off the debt she couldn’t afford to write off and crediting it all to her great-great-granddaughters.

Here, at Samhain, when the veil between the worlds is thin, if you stop for just a moment, you can hear the women of your own blood calling out to you.  The women of your own line will talk to you:

I was too afraid to join them, but in my heart, I knew we deserved the vote…