Try the salmon … and definitely the croquettes

It was a quiet day on campus. The Friday of the next-to-last week of summer classes moves pretty slowly. I spent a few minutes in an audio booth:

At home, the folks are here for the weekend. After work we took them out to a local restaurant, a farm-to-fork joint. It was even called The Farm. I had the ribs:

Other things they have are better.

In the restroom they have a newspaper collage. There was a date, in the collage, Thursday, July 31, 1919. Let’s assume all of the clippings were from that same issue, making this story is 98 years old:

It seems an odd thing to read, all these years later, but people ought to have an opportunity to educate themselves on civics and the issues of the day. So let’s refresh ourselves on the issue of their day. By the end of 1919 a significant chunck of American women could vote in presidential elections. As the world started recovering from the Great War more women throughout the world became able to cast a ballot. That created more pressure here at home and several votes that would give the power to women were lost by close counts in D.C.

In May of 1919 it finally happened. Woodrow Wilson brought the Congress back to vote on a potential constitutional amendment. Missouri ratified the amendment, just a few weeks before the story above was published. Arkansas became the 12th state to ratify earlier in that same week. Readers of this little story knew the amendment was a third of the way toward becoming the law of the land. The summer of 1919 must have been full of promise for suffragists.

Tennessee voted to make the 19th Amendment the law of the land in August of 1920. It took a long while, but over the next two generations of voters, ballots cast by gender started to even out.

No one voted on those ribs, though.

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