What It Means to Be American
A National Conversation

Explore : voting

Engagements

How the Suffragists Used a Few Good Men to Help Get the Vote

Lampooned as Hen-Pecked Wimps, Male Supporters of Crusading Women Reinvented Themselves as Dashing Trophy Spouses

By Brooke Kroeger
March 5, 2018

The early rap on men who found themselves married to hard-working, hard-core suffragists must have been downright humiliating. Cartoonists portrayed them as gents in tie-and-starched-collared misery, shirtsleeves up, infants in tow, forced to scrub clothes at a washtub or toe-rock a cradle while they flattened dough with a rolling pin. That changed completely in the 1910s, as American men who had been roped to the votes-for-women movement by wedlock reinvented themselves with dashing post-chivalrous aplomb.

Gone were the hen-pecked, emasculated …

Read More >

Engagements

I Do the Math That Keeps Elections Honest

It May Not Be Glamorous, But I Travel Around the Country Counting Votes

election, voting booths, vote, Election Day

By Bev Harris
November 4, 2014

I was standing outside a metal warehouse building that was part of the Volusia County, Florida elections department on November 16, 2004, worried that I might leave empty-handed.

Read More >

Engagements

People Died So I Could Vote

It’s Hard Not to Go to the Polls When a Generation of African-Americans Risked—and Sometimes Lost—Their Lives to Get You There

People Died So I Could Vote

By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
September 22, 2014

When we were growing up in South Los Angeles, my siblings and I often heard my dad’s impromptu sermons about matters of importance: the value of education, the perils of purchasing on credit, the virtue of hard work, and the dire necessity of voting.

Read More >