The symmetry was almost too rich. I was interviewing my first feminist role model Tuesday about the significance of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage when she interrupted me with the news that Joe Biden had just named Kamala Harris as his running mate.
“Now that’s what we are talking about here,” said longtime political journalist and college professor Carolyn Barta, invoking the words of suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony:
“There will never be complete equality until women themselves help to make the laws and elect the lawmakers.”
I had sought out Barta and two other insightful women -- local executives in education and the law -- to discuss this month’s historic anniversary of the 19th Amendment because I feared that it, like so many other female achievements, would be completely forgotten.
The three noted the eerie parallels between then and now: The 19th Amendment was ratified on the heels of the deadly 1918 flu pandemic. Black women were abandoned as part of the deal that pushed suffrage through; not until 1965′s Voting Rights Act did Americans of color fully attain access to a ballot.
Getting the vote “didn’t produce a yellow brick road. It’s been a very slow journey forward,” Barta said. “The promises of what women’s suffrage would bring are just now being realized -- and it’s been 100 years.”
The Anthony quote that has stuck in my head since I last wrote on this topic, just before the 2016 election: “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going.”
Ingratitude. Ambition. Nastiness. Whatever label you want to use, it’s taken a heck of a lot of it to keep on going for 100 years. But these three women, like millions of others, do just that -- working for a world that is fair not only for them and their daughters but for all who are marginalized or oppressed.
For more than two decades, Dr. Monica Williams, a vice president at the University of North Texas at Dallas, has been a passionate advocate for giving voice to the underserved.
Dr. Williams told me that the suffragists’ struggles remind her not just of the advantages of today but her responsibilities to the future. “We are here to help people understand that education is the great equalizer,” she said.
Her work as VP for university advancement is focused on bringing educational opportunities to southern Dallas. “This is a community that still has so much more to receive, and I want to do everything I can to give it the resources it needs to thrive.”
Dr. Williams said that as a Black woman whose right to vote didn’t become a reality until 45 years after the 19th Amendment, she equates “not voting with not mattering.”
Because Dr. Williams had been in back-to-back meetings Tuesday afternoon, I was the first to tell her about Harris’s selection. She immediately made the connection between the day’s news and the centennial.
Like the suffragettes, Dr. Williams said, Harris is a warrior and unafraid. “She doesn’t seem to be intimidated by the big boys.”
Growing up in Houston, Monica was surrounded by women who didn’t flinch at obstacles. “I’ve been blessed to have strong Black women in my family -- my mother, my mother’s mother and generations of great-grandmothers who paved the way for me,” she said.
Dinnertime conversations often turned to politics, and her grandmother took her and her siblings to the polls on many occasions to show them what Election Day was all about. “We would actually get into the voting booth and watch,” she recalled.
Today Dr. Williams impresses the importance of voting on her own daughter and her 5-year-old granddaughter. “She loves that voting sticker, and I put mine on her hand in hopes that it will instill in her the importance of this moment.”
Dr. Williams’s hope is that the 19th Amendment celebration will morph into a serious equity campaign.
She thinks she’s been rewarded for her merits, but she knows other women who haven’t. And she said that must change. “We aren’t asking for a handout but for what is due to us as a result of our hard work.”
Cynthia Garza, too, is driven to build a more equitable and just world, starting with her work as chief of the Conviction Integrity Unit in the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office.
When we talked Wednesday, she wondered aloud what her career – and even her life – would look like had it not been for the suffrage pioneers.
“These women fought long and hard through an arduous battle to get the 19th Amendment passed,” she said. “Look at the trajectory of where we are now in our history with the selection of Kamala Harris.”
Growing up as a young Hispanic woman in Houston, she saw plenty of examples of unfair treatment of women, whether in unequal pay, social issues or health care. Those disparities “motivate you to have your voice be heard,” she said. “You can’t just sit there and complain. For me, that means voting in every election -- local elections, primaries, the general election.”
It also means trying to motivate everyone she can to vote. She is particularly mindful of people who are eligible to vote but who can’t speak English. “I point them to resources such as videos so they can learn how the system works and go out to vote as well.”
This month’s centennial led her to reflect on the persistent lack of women in leadership roles in the legal field. She recalled how as a young lawyer, she questioned whether she would be seen as a good leader or “as something else when I tried to assert myself. Any woman in a male-dominated field has that same thought.”
But she reminds herself that women -- including the women who fought so hard for the vote -- would have accomplished nothing if they had let male disapproval paralyze them. “You have to brush those thoughts aside, hold your head up high and keep going,” she said.
As a trailblazer in the newsroom, Carolyn Barta faced more than snarky words.
“Without what happened 100 years ago, I would never have had the career I had in journalism,” she said. “It was not a good career path for a woman in the 1960s and 70s.”
For starters, she cut her teeth at a time when women at The Dallas Morning News lost their jobs as soon as the bosses recognized they were pregnant. That just wasn’t a “ladylike” look for reporters out in the community, Barta recalled.
She started in “women’s news” and the first time she applied to be the local political reporter the bosses said no, claiming that because she “couldn’t play golf or go to bars with my sources, I’d get beat on stories.” Management decided to give her a shot when she applied again in 1972, but they paired her with a man.
“It didn’t matter,” Barta said as I made her retell the story. “My political reporting career was finally launched.”
She worked for several decades as a political reporter, columnist and editor at The News -- and later as part of the Editorial Page team -- before teaching journalism at SMU for 15 years.
She got a kick out of my telling her that she was my first feminist role model. “I never thought of myself as a feminist. I was just trying to get ahead in my chosen profession.”
But from the time I joined the newspaper in 1980, I looked up to her as a woman who was fearless and surefooted, whether it was covering local, state and national politics or negotiating the male-dominated management ranks. Watching her go toe to toe with strong male egos -- so often the only woman at the table -- are lessons I’ve never forgotten.
Musing on what women’s votes will mean this November, Barta believes that the “three Ps” -- pandemic, protests and today’s toxic politics -- will play a big role in their decision-making.
The pandemic has increased the burdens on most women, and that could have a big influence on their vote, she said. “We remember the soccer moms of the 1990s. This year it’s the pandemic moms or, as they’ve been called, the guardian women. These are women who take care of children or their elderly parents.”
She said that women are also looking with concern at the responses to racism, to the protests and to the social unrest. “Women are starting to recognize that women are better problem solvers,” Barta said, and she expects that will increase the number elected this year to Congress and statehouses.
Women today, she said, listen “to the name-calling, bullying, disregard for ethics and common courtesy and they say, ‘I don’t want this as a role model for my children.’”
“If women are paying attention to this anniversary, they are saying, this [political climate] is not why the suffragettes wanted us to have the right to vote.”
