Oct 05 2001
Mail, votes and taxes
Our letter carrier rarely manages to deliver the mail before I get home in the afternoon. So most days, I end up going downstairs to get the mail first thing in the morning, usually dressed only in my pink bathrobe and bare feet, which could really traumatize innocent passers-by. Fortunately for the innocent passers-by, they are hardly ever passing by at 4:00 a.m.
This morning, yesterday’s mail held no sympathy cards or letters (yay!), but it did have big Municipal Election booklets (boo!). We seem to have Municipal Elections as often as the Olympics are held, i.e., constantly. As I walked upstairs with the booklets, I realized that it was actually pretty despicable that I was annoyed by having to read through the voting materials, make my decisions, and then exercise my right to vote (maybe it’s because it’s exercise and I hate that in any form), considering that so many people in this world still don’t have this right, and that women in this country had to fight for years to get the vote. When my grandmother was born, women still couldn’t vote.
Both my grandmother’s father and Lucy Stone’s felt there was no point in educating women. Both these ladies defied their fathers and went to college. Lucy, born in 1818, was the first woman in Massachusetts to get a college degree. Lucy kept her maiden name (so did I) on marrying Henry Blackwell, and together they fought for blacks and women to have the right to vote. Lucy refused to pay taxes on the grounds that since she couldn’t vote, it was taxation without representation — the very principal our country was founded on. The government repossessed her furniture to pay the taxes, but Lucy had made her point.
So in Lucy’s honor and my grandmother’s, I will stop whining and read that election material this weekend.
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