On relentlessness

Is it worth it?

My mother took me to see the musical Suffs. I’ve been studying women’s suffrage for a little while now for a project I’m working on. But so much of it was new to my mother. “Why didn’t I learn any of this in school?” she asked.

These ladies went to see Suffs, the musical, in Chicago.

Misogyny, patriarchy: these ideologies nearly erased the history of women's suffrage. It’s complicated. It’s uncomfortable. It challenges the story of the “victors.”

Women’s suffrage is a complicated story. It is not simply “and then they won the vote.” It is a decades-long struggle, beginning with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 when women signed a “Declaration of Independence.” It carried on as women organized and re-organized. It carried on when in 1872 Susan B. Anthony brazenly cast a ballot and was hauled before a judge.

The long fight

When you learn about how long women organized, the strategies they pursued, how they pounded the halls of the Capitol year after year, put on the first ever march on Washington, were arrested and beaten, sent to a workhouse and force fed, you might find yourself, as my mother did, asking “why didn’t they teach me any of this?”

I recognize that this story is not singular. Many groups have fought, suffered, endured, and sometimes won the shadow of a victory. But they—Black people, indigenous people, for example—have been undermined by the same, enduring forces that marginalize them even today. It’s like the absolutely banana pants and offensive argument of the Trump administration that teaching about historical racism is meant to make white people feel bad.

Relentless

What strikes me about these fighters is that they were relentless.

American suffragists were relentless.

But stop: sometimes there’s a shadow around that word. There are shades of annoying persistence and antagonization. Relentless sometimes sounds unforgiving, rigid. A relentless woman may sound like a threat, unladylike, rude. So be it.

I see the beauty in relentlessness. How it can be curative. When you are relentless, you have more than just a purpose in life. You have more than a hobby. More than a valuable role in your community.

You are living a life on fire.

What if?

What if you were relentless?

What if you marched silently along the White House fence for months, in snow and rain, while men stopped to harass or spit on you, not knowing if your actions would be noticed by Woodrow Wilson, gazing out the window of the West wing?

What if you refused to eat until you were acknowledged as a political prisoner, unfairly locked up in a dismal workhouse, and not a common criminal?

What if you were beaten by police, mocked in the papers, told to wait and wait and wait, that now was not the time, that other political matters were more urgent?

What if you got just goddamn tired of all the obstacles?

Would it be worth it to carry on?

Is it worth it to be relentless?

There’s a song in the musical Suffs that asks this question.

It’s worth it.

Your story is worth it.

Being relentless, about whatever moves you, is worth it.