Every two years (and sometimes sooner in special circumstances), everyone in the U.S. has the privilege of voting for some of our civil servants, from president right down to county clerks. Some people ignore this right and don't vote, but all of us should because the things we vote for affect our lives each and every day. Military men and women died so that we would maintain the freedom to vote. In the case of women's rights, many women suffered and some died for that, too. Right to Vote is about that struggle.

A house on Franklin Street in Richmond, Virginia -- a house that's still there and which I probably drove by a million or so times over the years -- hosted the first meeting of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia on November 20, 1909. It isn't known if the owner of the house, S. Dabney Crenshaw, approved of his wife Anne's involvement in the suffrage movement, but 19 women gathered in his parlor that November day to discuss how they could win the right to vote, and thus participate in electing the representatives to state and federal posts who made the laws that dictated how they were to live. Along with women in other states, they risked ridicule, hatred and violence by taking the bold steps that led to the 19th Amendment in August of 1920, giving women the right to vote in elections.

In my story, Right to Vote, Olivia Jones isn't opposed to becoming a wife and mother, she's only opposed to the accepted concept that being a wife and mother is all a woman could or should be. She wants to have some control over her future.

And right up to today, isn't that what women still want? We owe it to our predecessors to take advantage of what they fought so hard to gain. In the next election, we should vote! Thanks to women like Anne Crenshaw and others, we have the right.

Enjoy!
Dee

Prior to writing her first fiction only a few years ago, Dee S. Knight lived a varied lifestyle. After college she married her high school sweetheart and they became house parents at a home for wards of the court. Thus, she went from newlywed to "mother" of a dozen teenage boys, in a month. Two years of living in one city proved to be enough, and she and her husband spent the next eight years as long-distance truckers. Swiftly following their trucking years, she became a computer consultant, high school and adult ed teacher, technical writer and novelist. More than thirty years later, she's still married to her own hero and finds life infinitely interesting. She currently resides in Tidewater, Virginia (surrounded by men in uniform!), while Jack once again trucks the U.S.