Yesterday J and I took the T into Boston to see Suffs: The Musical, a dramatic retelling of the female suffrage movement.
I grew up in a politically apathetic, non-voting family. Naturally, one of the first things I did when I went to college was register to vote. Voting felt simultaneously grown up and rebellious. Nobody–not my parents, friends, nor teachers–had ever asked me what I thought about the state of the world.
Every time I vote, I remember how recently (white) women were given that right by passage of the 19th Amendment. If the right to vote is something suffragists and civil rights activists thought was important enough to fight, bleed, and go to jail for, I damn well am going to take advantage of that hard-earned privilege.
All this being said, I didn’t actually know much about the suffragist movement. Suffs tells the story of Alice Paul, a suffragist I’d never heard of. And although I knew who fearless journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells was, I didn’t know the role she played in the fight for female suffrage.
Suffs does an excellent job of teasing out the tensions in the suffragist movement. Alice Paul’s youthful radicalism grates against the establishment tendencies of Carrie Chapman Catt, who wanted to appease the powerful men Paul wants to confront. A similar dynamic plays out between Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell, who was willing to appease white feminists while Wells (in one of the first act’s most powerful songs) refuses to wait her turn.
The road to progress has never been smooth. The musical’s most moving moment comes at the very end, after the 19th Amendment has been passed and Alice Paul turns her sights toward a new goal: the Equal Rights Amendment. In “Keep Marching,” the ensemble cast connects the dots between what the suffragists did in the 20th century and what is happening now.
Rights that are given can be taken away, as is evident in current Republican attempts to make voting difficult and expensive, especially for women, by requiring needless paperwork. The fight for a more perfect union isn’t a sprint or a marathon: it’s a relay race, with each generation handing the baton to the next. The lesson of Suffs rings true today. If your vote had no power, they wouldn’t try so hard to suppress it.
Hoarded Ordinaries 