It’s Election Day. The stakes are enormous. So be sure you vote…for democracy…all the way through your ballot.
I did!
Then what?
For the answer, let me introduce you to my great-great-great grandmother.
Her name is Rhoda Denison Bement—and she was an ardent abolitionist and life-long suffragist.
She was even at Seneca Falls.
But it’s complicated.
Rhoda Denison Bement was actually a regular parishioner at the Wesleyan Methodist Church where the famed women’s convention took place. But she was only a member there because, five years earlier, she’d been banished from the Presbyterian church down the street. At one point, the intensity of her abolitionist efforts erupted into a showdown with the church’s minister, who put her on trial for “disorderly and unchristian conduct.” She was found guilty, banished, and soon joined the church that hosted the historic convention.
Now take a moment and think about the long arc of Rhoda Bement’s life, and the lives of her fellow suffragists.
Born in 1806, she was kicked out of that first church in 1843. She was only 37 years old, but so intense about the need to end slavery she was banished from an abolitionist church.
The historic convention at her new church home took place in 1848, when she was 42 years old.
She would then spend the rest of her 82 years both as a conductor of the Underground Railroad and fierce advocate for women’s suffrage. She died in 1888.
The 19th Amendment wasn’t ratified until 1920.
So Rhoda Denison Bement spent her entire life raising hell for suffrage that America’s women wouldn’t see for another 32 years after her death.
Now think about the generation that followed her in the movement. Let’s say, the teenagers who watched or read about that 1848 convention. Those women would’ve been in their 50s at the time of Bement’s death, and more than likely also did not live to see the 19th Amendment ratified in 1920.
Only the next generation of the movement—the teenagers at the time of Bement's death—would live to see ultimate victory in 1920. Most of them, at least. They would have reached their 50s and 60s when the 19th Amendment was ratified.
Rhoda Denison Bement is just one of generations of women who dedicated entire lifetimes of struggle to achieve their goal of joining America’s democracy. For many, these would be lifetimes of disappointment, at least in terms of achieving their ultimate goal. But they kept fighting.
Only those in the last generation of that movement, building from the foundations of those who’d struggled and passed away years before, would experience their joint, multi-generational victory in 1920. (And a century later, of course, we still have not elected a woman president).
You can tell the same story about the struggle for freedom and equality for Black Americans. And even with the Civil War, abolition, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, it still took generations of heroes to build civil rights protections into our nation’s laws, and then even more time to get those laws enforced meaningfully. Again, like Bement, entire lifetimes of struggle. Many ending in disappointment, never to see progress. And countless lives cut short due to that struggle.
John Lewis was one of the lucky ones who got to see the fruit of generations of action and sacrifice. But even when John Lewis passed away, some of those fruits were wilting before his eyes. Things were going the other way.
What’s the lesson from all this?
It’s that the battle for democracy is a long one. A never-ending one. And no, it’s not an inevitable arc bending in one positive and inevitable morally righteous direction. It’s always contested—pushing one way for years, then back the other way for years more. If and how it bends comes down to who’s pushing harder, longer.
So once we understand that we are in a battle over democracy itself—like Bement and women suffragists, like Lewis and countless civil rights heroes—we must change our own timeframe of all we do.
The plans. The strategies. Our persistence and stamina. The ways we measure success or failure. All need to be in the context of that long battle for democracy.
And we also must see that while much of the work we must do involves the work of campaigning for candidates who will protect democracy and against those who will subvert it, so much of the most important work occurs outside that campaign cycle. And long before the next campaigns even begin. Lifting democracy every day and over time involves so much more.
Bottom line: today is indeed a big day. A set of elections with huge stakes, and major consequences. A decisive outcome in one direction will secure democracy in critical ways; a decisive outcome in the opposite direction may place it in far deeper peril. Or there could be a mixed result, with more security in some ways and places, and greater peril in others.
But whatever happens, never forget the lesson from Rhoda Bement Davis’s life—that the battle for democracy is a long battle. It requires all of us to keep fighting FOR democracy after our greatest victories, after tough defeats, and after mixed results.
And while some of us may see results from our effort today and tomorrow, many others will see results only years from now, perhaps after tough setbacks.
Or they may come even after we’re gone, but those may be victories which our kids and grandkids and future generations benefit from.
So whoever you are and whatever happens…
Vote. Then…
Keep. Going.