Women’s suffrage had been adopted as an amendment to the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by Congress in June 1919, but it required ratification by 36 state legislatures, some of them recalcitrant. By the end of December 1919, only 22 legislatures had ratified. New Mexico became the 32nd on February 19, 2019. Otero-Warren’s organizing work was essential, especially in winning the votes of Spanish-speakers here.
She had been born in Los Lunas in 1881, the daughter of a politically well-connected family. After the family moved to Santa Fe, the thirty-year-old Otero-Warren found her calling in pursuing the cause of women suffrage, closely connected with the fight, still on-going, to procure equal status in all venues.
A Republican, Otero-Warren made good use of her family’s political connections, choosing persuasion rather than the dramatic efforts of more militant feminists. Those tactics might not have worked well in this then-conservative state. She did not attempt to reach Native-Americans who would not achieve the vote for several more decades and still do not have equal rights with other U.S. citizens. The disappearance of young Navajo women, often abducted, raped and murdered by Anglo men, is still unaccounted for, one of the consequences of their lack of legal protection even today. (The contemporary movie, Wind River, gives a harrowing account of one such case in Wyoming, a terrible irony since Wyoming was the first state to ratify the suffrage amendment in 1869, at least on state issues.)
Otero-Warren succeeded by constantly bombarding the New Mexico Legislature, arm-twisting important male politicians, and recruiting other women to the fight. It was crucial that she put out suffrage literature in Spanish as well as English. And so when the Tennessee Legislature became the 36th to ratify the Amendment—purportedly because the mother of one undecided congressman urged him to “do right by the ladies”—New Mexico was already in the fold.
We are at a curious moment today, in terms of suffrage and of women’s rights generally. While we rather blithely accept the triumphs of suffrage, with little knowledge of the enormous effort it took, beginning in the 1880’s with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and many other now-forgotten women, we are also not as pained as we might be by the fact that voting has not brought us more of the rights and advantages routinely enjoyed by white men. Here in New Mexico, we earn 83 cents to the dollar paid our male peers—the national rate is 80 cents on the dollar—but while we now outnumber men in academic degrees, we often lack opportunities and professional advancement especially in certain fields. The continuing problems of our over-responsibility for our families will not be solved until we have national free child care. This will require a reformation of the nation’s priorities.
Perhaps most importantly, as Meredith Machen, board member of the League of Women Voters of New Mexico, observed, we do not have equal voices. “Go to public meetings and watch—women still have to “hedge” their voices. You can see it in the Legislature.”
I have seen it in any number of gatherings. We are seldom the first to speak, and we do not speak as frequently, often larding what we do say with apologies and self-diminishing remarks such as, “I know there’s another side to the story” or ” It seems to me that…”—comments almost never voiced by men.
Does it mean we are more likely to be listened to?
I doubt it.
Children and dogs don’t respond well to soft-voiced pleading and men are not a lot more likely than children and dogs to be persuaded.
It takes an Otero-Warren, with her crowd of followers waving signs and wearing the suffrage colors of purple, white and gold, to speak loudly and clearly and forcefully.
May we all make opportunities to effect change in 2020.
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