Suffrage

On August 24, 1920—more than 40 years after Susan B. Anthony first penned a proposed U.S. Constitutional Amendment to grant women the legal right to vote—the weight of that historic decision all came down to one man, Harry T. Burn, Sr., who, at age 24, was the youngest-elected member of the Tennessee House of Representatives. When the roll call was held, Burn—wearing a “nay” red carnation—switched sides and cast the decisive “yea” vote to ratify the 19th Amendment.

More than 144 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, nearly 58 years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and 72 years after the Suffrage movement was founded in Seneca Falls, N.Y., women had finally received the vote. By this time, the Amendment’s principal architects—Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—had been dead for 14 and 18 years, respectively.

After Burn’s fateful decision, legend has it that he eluded physical assault by hiding in the attic of the Capitol until the coast was clear. Explaining his flip-flop vote, Burn said that he had discovered, in his pocket, a personal note penned by his mother.

“Vote for suffrage!” she wrote to her son. “Don’t keep them in doubt. I have been watching to see how you stood.” Burn later said to his colleagues, “A good boy always does what his mother asks him to do.”[1]

Yet back in Ohio, things weren’t so simple. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that in Hamilton County, out of the 50,000 women eligible to vote, only 2,000 registered and only half regularly voted in the early years.[2] The Medina Sentinel reported in 1920 that only 21 women voted in contrast to the 231 men who voted in Ward A of the village. Not a very good showing.[3]

With the long process of gaining the right to vote, why did women not immediately jump on this?

Old habits are hard to break. Women had long been treated as property, vessels to produce sons, and sons are important because we decided that’s how inheritance gets passed down. Devaluing women is called sexism. And we all have a little sexism in us.

Maybe you’re thinking “I’m not sexist. I affirm women.” Yet watch what happens if I refer to God as a mother. Our Mother, who art in heaven. I lost some of you with that phrase, even though the scriptures are replete with feminine images for God. Even God’s Spirit of Wisdom in the Greek has a feminine name. The word for God’s Spirit is Sophia. Any woman with that name bears the name of God. God, who longs to gather us under Her wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks.

Jesus came on the scene. Born of a woman. Just like all of us, God could not enter into the world without a woman. Matthew’s Gospel starts with a genealogy. Did you tune out for all those names? Just a list of people who have crazy names that are hard to pronounce. Yet this would be a list of A List celebrities back in the day. The readers would know the names and the stories around them and there are women named. Tamar, the mother of Perez.

Tamar who was shunned by her father in-law Judah who took matters into her own hands. She tricked Judah and got the justice that should have been hers all along. She made history and is mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus.

Rahab is a prostitute that helped Joshua take down Jericho. She is in the genealogy of Jesus.

Ruth is also named. You know Ruth. I preached on her back in the fall.[4] Ruth the Moabite, those awful, ungodly people. She came to marry Boaz the father of Obed. Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse the father of David, the greatest king of Israel. The Moabites were the offspring of Lot and his daughters. Lot who ran away from Abraham and sought his own way in Sodom and Gomorrah but due to the wickedness of those towns, the towns were destroyed. The Moabites and the Israelites were separated then and there and would have been forever more if the laws stayed in place. But Ruth and her mother in law Naomi broke those laws. They reunited tribes that were meant to be together and those two tribes produced the greatest leader Israel had ever seen in David.

Yet even the greatest of us still make mistakes. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. King David sees Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, one of his soldiers. Some rabbis say it was consensual and some say it was rape. David has sex with Bathsheba, arranges to have Uriah killed, and then marries her. Not a good way to marry someone. This union produces Solomon, the wisest king.[5] Bathsheba is in the genealogy of Jesus.

The phrase “Well-behaved women rarely make history” comes to mind. These are just some of the women mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy. How anyone can claim a model family from the pages of the bible is beyond me. Even Jesus is not from a model family. Mary is his pregnant, unwed teenage mother. Jesus learned on the knee of his mother. He starts off his ministry with men, but soon his following grows. He calls his disciples, teaches them an upside-down view of the kingdom of God and goes to eat with a fan. This Pharisee asks Jesus to eat at his house. A woman, who was a sinner, hears this and shows up and weeps and bathes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and anoints them.

Jesus doesn’t care about her reputation, he cares about her restoration. Jesus is about community. The Beloved Community of God where all gather in peace. Where it doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, or what you’ve done; all that matters is your commitment to the ways of Jesus. This leads the Apostle Paul to write to the Galatians. They were making all sorts of laws establishing a hierarchy. Free Jewish males got all the rights and privileges and everyone else came after. Paul calls them foolish and reminds them in no uncertain terms in chapter three, “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”[6]

Despite the words of Paul. Despite the legions of women following Jesus. Despite Jesus welcoming women and talking with them and healing them and forgiving their sins. Despite the women listed in the genealogy of Christ who didn’t play by the rules. Despite everything, women are still mistreated in our world. Because despite all of our progress, women are often viewed only  as to who their married to, their ability to have children, or as property.

My mom raised me to respect women, to treat them as equals. And a good boy always does what his mother tells him to do. When I said something really stupid on one of our first dates, Kate took me to task and I thought, “Finally! A worthy opponent!” She won that fight and almost every single one since. I like to think of myself as a feminist who believes women are people and not property yet I still carry sexist thoughts and ideas.

One of the most shameful things I ever did was produce an ad in college. I was working in advertising for the OU student newspaper. I was going to run one for Moms’ weekend with a woman with a burning plate of food saying, “Don’t make mom cook, take her out, to…” whatever restaurant I was trying to sell to. Kate challenged me. Where did those thoughts come from? My mom loved going out to eat to celebrate. It’s what we do as a family and have always done. Why did I make that ad that depicted a woman in the kitchen?

And why did it take us so long to give women the right to vote? Why did it take until 1972 to get gender discrimination off the books with the help of future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Why are women still mistreated and assaulted and more? Tradition, I guess. Why did women not step up and run with the right to vote? Many did, but societal change moves slow. And their husbands might have been telling them NOT to vote. We often take one another for granted and don’t want to think of the harm we are doing to one another. It’s easier, so we think, to keep going the way our parents and grandparents did. We would be dishonoring them if we didn’t.

Yet for all the men in the genealogy of Jesus, five women are named. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. Five women who didn’t play by the rules of their society. Five women who would each unleash change upon their communities and would make a lasting impact in the history of the world.

Maybe we men are afraid of our position in the world. We need to be needed. It feels to good to be needed. Yet if people say that a woman can do whatever a man can do… well, that makes us nervous. We start putting rules around them. Maybe it stems back to the fact that we have so little to contribute to the starting of life, we can’t make food into a human so we are a little insecure about our role. Maybe that’s the start of it all… I don’t know.

What I do know is that when I hear how my fellow female pastors are treated, I am sickened.[7] They are asked in their interviews if they plan on having kids. I wasn’t asked that, and most men aren’t. Their appearance is commented upon constantly. One close female friend reported recently how after a particularly hard-hitting sermon, one man said, “I didn’t hear a word of your sermon because I was distracted by how well that dress fits you.”

I am often ignorant of the things women have to endure. Things that I take for granted and never have to think about, women think about all the time. I wear a suit. I am bald. I’m up here boldly giving my opinion based in scripture, and I don’t think twice about it. Yet if I were a woman, my clothing and hairstyle would probably be unconsciously critiqued.

I believe feminism is for everybody. I believe Jesus blessed and cured and taught women and made them his disciples. If it weren’t for women preachers, we’d never know the Easter story. If it weren’t for women benefactors of the early church, it would have died in Jerusalem. Women are instrumental in the witness of scripture, the life of faith, and our 200 year history here in Medina.

What we need is a bigger imagination around gender roles. A world where women can be strong, where men can be tender. Where women can work on cars if they want to, and men can be nurses. We need that world because we’ve always been in it. We’ve just made up the rules from the start. Sure there are biological factors but those are not descriptive nor should they determine pay, career length, or job type.

The future of suffrage is making sure all voices are heard. In the first two waves of feminism, leaders lifted voices of women. Now in the next wave, women of color and those below the poverty line should be lifted. Trans voices should be heard. And men need to have a place. The first two waves of feminism declared that anything a man can do, so could a woman. Or as the saying goes, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.” The next conversation will make room for men. Not the toxic masculinity of the alpha male who needs to be pampered and catered to and has to dominate others, but a new form of masculinity which demands that rights be shared. Clearly, we need new strategies and theories and models and imagination, until it is on earth as it is in heaven.

So let us dream. Discuss. Add our voices and stories. Amplify the voices of women and recognize their contribution to our history. And, if you can… call your mom.

Further Reading

Sarah Bessy, Jesus Feminist.

bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody; passionate politics

Monica Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, a womanist theology.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Bread not Stone; The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation

Maya Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence.

Barbara Essex, Bad Girls of the Bible

Works Cited

 Story found at http://www.ucc.org/a-good-boy-always-does-what-h

 Steve Hambley, Women’s Suffrage in Medina County: A story of controversy and perseverance. Helping Hands, May/June 2019. Page 9.

 Ibid.

 Ruth part one: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/concerning-moabites-the-story-of-ruth-part-1/
Ruth part two: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/the-story-of-ruth-part-2-beloved-community/

 https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/sex-in-church/

 Gal 3:26-29

 https://youtu.be/bTcaAkG86QQ

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