With the election only a month away out greatest hope lies in voting. It's hard to maintain any sense of optimism in the face of a government which has such hatred toward so many of its citizens. We choose our government at the ballot box.
Today's bit of craft activism is the a young women I've named Veronica. Veronica Votes. She's old enough to remember her mother and grandmother voting for the first time. Like my father's mother she is bucking expectations and choosing to have a career. My grandmother worked as an administrative assistant in a factory right out of high school, and against the expectations of the day for a middle class women she chose to go back to work after my father was born. She would continue to work until retirement age, at that point she went to work for my dad as his bookkeeper. In retrospect not only is her choice amazing to me but so is my grandfather's unequivocal support of her choices. She is my feminist icon. The woman who I remember behind the counter in my dad's shop, who taught me to love romance novels, and how to bake a perfect apple pie. Who taught me how to know whether an antique plate was authentic or a reproduction. To say nothing of letting me learn to type on her Smith Corona. She worked for most of her adult life, not out of financial necessity but because she loved what she did.
My mother's mom, my Nana, worked on the floor in a factory, a single mother raising three young children on her own her story almost the polar opposite of my Grandma. Her fourth child, the eldest girl was raised by relatives from birth, the product of a rape so traumatic that she never realized she was pregnant. She married some years later and had three children with her husband. He died in WWII, leaving my Nana to raise three young children alone. She went to work in a factory that made electric components such as switch plates and lamp sockets. As she struggled to keep a roof over the heads of her family and food on the table she watched the men she worked alongside, doing the same work, be paid enough to buy homes, afford a car, and all of the other trappings of middle class life. Paid more solely for being men. Eventually the second eldest was also sent to live with relatives who were more well off. My grandmother walked five miles to work nearly every day until she retired because the bus cost too much. For all that she never made us aware of her poverty. I spent nearly every weekend growing up with her, reading and rereading the Little House Series, watching wrestling and the Rockford Files. She was the person who taught me to sew, how to use coupons, and how to make Portuguese kale soup. Only 4'11" tall she was nevertheless a towering figure in my youth
In my imaginary narrative Veronica is one of the younger women working in that factory, in the office, strong, independent, her ambition mentored by other women who believed she should have choices and opportunities and a career of her own.
I'm grateful to have had my grandmothers and other women of their generation in my life, the front-runners of modern feminism even if that wasn't what they called themselves. Be like Veronica. Honor the struggles of the women who came before us with your the best way possible. Vote.
