Votes for Humanity: Learnings from the Suffrage Movement
One hot Monday night, after my daughter was in bed, I was doing what most of us do late into the night, scrolling social media while a podcast played in the background. As I watched a video on creating oil pastel portraits, the NPR Politics Podcast slowly leaked into my cautiousness. Within a couple minutes, something in the podcast caught my attention.
I still don’t know what topic did it. Maybe it was inflated costs from tariffs, the detainment of asylum seekers, the war in Israel or the country-wide protests. Yet, in that one moment, despite not knowing consciously what grabbed my attention, internally, the imaginary cup of empathy, sitting at the center of my being, gave way. A flood of emotion poured out all over my quiet living room, leaving it in a muddy mess of tears laced with - “how could this be happening to our country and what the heck can I do about it?”
I sat there, suddenly open to reality, the gravity of waking up hiding hard. In an instant, my body became a homing beacon, a lighthouse, screaming “we have lost our way, it is time to do something.”
The next morning, I did what most artists do; I sat with my feelings and began to work through them with paint. As each color covered the canvas, two themes come into clarity;
1. Each day I was getting increasingly concerned for my country, for the next generation and for my daughter.
2. I needed to use my voice, my soul and/or my body to do something about it.
Trying to navigate this realization of needing to do something, became really scary. I was raised in a household of do as your told not as you do, so the playbook to speaking up and doing something was far from the norm in my daily life, yet I knew I needed to move forward. I began to look for answers, specifically in the past, our history - our female history. What did the women before us do when they wanted to create change?
I landed on the Women’s Suffrage Movement.
“Into the Light”
24” x 30”
This piece was created wondering what it felt like for women starting to use their voice to demand the vote.
Over one hundred years of women fighting from 1840’s to the 1920’s trying to get the right to vote. The more I read, the more I learned, and the more I felt emboldened to figure out how to use my own voice and create change. Their actions became a playbook of the do’s and don’ts for women creating change.
The upcoming series of artwork that you are about see unfold in the coming weeks, is work created from this exploration. A voyage not just through women creating change and getting the vote, but also in how they found their voice, collessed together, held each other up and demanded that people look at their own prejudices. Our ancestors gave us a starting place, a map, a playbook and it begins inside with building our own resilience and tenacity while creating inclusion and believing there is a way forward for everyone.
I hope as I share the stories about each piece, it emboldens you. It creates a space for you to question how to find your own voice. How you can create change in your own community? And how most of all, it invites you to use empathy as a tool for creating a better place for our neighbors, our communities, our country and the next generations that come after us.
