The Sun Rises...And Sets....

Suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, 1917

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote - we still await the right to parity on the wage-earning dollar - after decades of struggle and hundreds of state campaigns. At the end, the vote came down to Harry Burn’s mother, Febb, a Tennessee farmer’s widow who urged her legislator son to “be a good boy” and vote for suffrage.

“I changed my vote in favor of ratification first because I believe in full suffrage as a right; second, I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify; third, I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification; fourth, I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free seventeen million women from political slavery was mine….”

 — Harry Burn

Once, America was a land where the rights of citizens were on an ever widening horizon of hope. Now we seem to be sinking into a cranky, greedy and lazy miasma of hate inspired xenophobic empowerment of a few. Read how the one of the men who claim to be the king of the teabaggers would take away the right to vote based on property ownership....and let the sun set back into dark the night of the 18th century.