It’s very hard to see when one is being knocked about on all sides, going two steps forward and one step back on a good day. In circles or backwards on a bad day.
But here is one of those boring but very important examples of just how well the marriage equality movement is doing … like most suffragette (women’s voting rights) campaigns took decades to win.
In the case of the United States it took 70 years of organised campaigning …
“behind almost every great moment in history, there are heroic people doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time.
That great suffragist and excellent counter, Carrie Chapman Catt, estimated that the struggle had involved 56 referendum campaigns directed at male voters, plus “480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party campaigns to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”
Now that is what I call slow and painful. What we are doing is a breeze, by comparison.
Tags: Carrie Chapman Catt, Gail Collins, gay marriage and women's rights, gay marriage United States, marriage equality, same sex marriage, suffragette
