The post office is the last place you would expect to have an epiphany. But there it was, staring me right in the face, in the form of a bleary-eyed, disgruntled Chinese postal worker.
You’ve all been there, standing in line at the post office, waiting to send a package or letter in typical humdrum fashion. But this particular time was different. I stood there in Kaifeng, China, back in November, absentee ballot clutched tightly in hand, ready to vote for the next American president, when inexplicably the whispers of history lessons past surfaced in the present.
Passing my ballot into the postal worker’s busy hands– hands which likely had never held a ballot of their own– I imagined the suffragist voices which had once resonated so loudly through Tennessee. I thought of Nashville caught in the throes of a revolution between yellow rose and red during the War of the Roses. Finally, I recalled those women who had so passionately demanded a voice — a voice that had yet to be given to this postal worker or his co-patriots.
In that moment in China, I stood among people who rarely, if ever, had a voice in their government, yet they were the very ones who would help carry my voice and my vote back to Chattanooga. It was irony in a most tragic form. I had never felt their loss, nor my gain, so dearly. Never had our suffrage history been so alive and so significant.
As with most young women in their 20s, I grew up learning about Tennessee’s role in the legendary battle for women’s suffrage. I read picture books, watched documentaries and listened to lectures dedicated to the historic showdown at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville where suffragists and anti-suffragists alike had gathered in the wake of the 19th Amendment.