INDIANAPOLIS — Around the nation and here in Indianapolis on Tuesday, women cast their ballots.
"Especially as a woman, I think it's important to vote for women's rights," said Gianna Mohrman, who came out to cast her ballot Tuesday morning in Indianapolis.
The fight to get women the right to vote was a hard won victory by suffragettes more than a century ago.
But the battle for women's suffrage started 150 years ago, on Nov. 5, 1872, when Susan B. Anthony and a handful of other women cast their ballots. Still illegal at the time for women to vote, Anthony was arrested two weeks later.
Laura Wilson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Indianapolis, said that sparked the beginning of a national women's suffrage movement.
"It was that arrest, the subsequent court case and the $100 fine that really started bringing attention to the suffrage movement," Wilson said.
Half a century later, that right was finally approved by Congress in 1919, and ratified in 1920. That November, more than 8 million American women voted legally for the very first time.
As the decades passed, women's strength as a voting population took hold.
"The early voters, I think a lot of candidates didn't feel the need to reach out to. And we really see this pick up in World War II and certainly the aftermath of World War II where suddenly candidates recognized this is a large portion of the electorate, you can't just message to the husbands and the fathers, you want to be able to reach out to the female voters to," Wilson said.
But beyond the vote itself, women have remained a minority when it comes to representation in American and Hoosier politics.
"Women are a majority of the population, but chronically underrepresented in all levels and branches of government," Wilson said.
Indiana has never elected a female governor or a female senator. Nationally, two of the Hoosier state's nine congressional seats will be held by a woman at the start of the next term. Statewide, just 35 of our 150 seats in the state legislature are held by women, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
Nationwide, those numbers are growing.
"And in 2016, 2018, 2020 and we'll wait to see here in 2022, we've had record-breaking numbers of women being elected, which is really exciting," Wilson said.
As the midterm election votes are tallied and counted, millions of American women have been able to weigh in on the big issues — choosing candidates through their positions on everything from inflation to abortion.
More than a century after those first female ballots were cast, Wilson said this could be a record-breaking year again for women in elected office.
"I think that would be really, truly living out the legacy of the suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, it's not just enough to vote, to have your voice heard, it's being there at the table itself," Wilson said. "And if we have more female candidates, I think it's encouraging to voters of all kinds to understand that those representations matter."
As women voters hit the polls casting their ballots, it's keeping the suffragist vision alive still today.
"All the people that worked toward women's rights and for women to have the right to vote, I think it's important to execute our right. And I have two daughters, so hopefully I'm teaching them that as well," Mohrman said.
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