Today marks the 100th anniversary of the day when California voters approved a measure granting its female residents the right to vote. Here as in other places, the issue divided the cosmopolitan, forward-looking city folk — who worried that since women were more religious than men, they would quickly vote in Temperance and Bible-thumping dullards — and the more traditional, rural folk who thought exactly the same thing. The big hurdle that suffrage had to overcome was the overwhelming No sentiment in populous San Francisco. Incidentally, it is likely that the impetus for the Federal suffrage amendment in 1919 was the impending 1920 Census: everybody knew that it was going to count more people in the cities than the counties, reapportioning representation to favor these vile centers of corruption and vice.
Anyway, cheers to one milestone in the advance of equal rights.
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You spelled “knew” wrong.
Thanks for catching it. Corrected. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the shift in norms regarding correct orthography and usage in English writing. On the one hand, I’m really annoyed by the loose standards that now prevail (I’ve caught errors in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which just wouldn’t have happened ten years ago). On the other, I think this can be viewed as a return to long-term trend, and the focus on standardization that we were taught a deviation — Chaucer and Shakespeare spelled things however they liked at the moment, and without consistency, for example.