Women's suffrage commemorative coin will denote history made in Tennessee | Marsha Blackburn

Like most constitutional battles, women’s fight for the vote was protracted, divisive and grew more tempestuous as the country inched closer to acknowledging equality for the fairer sex.

Tennessee women played a special part in that fight, ending in 1920 what their forebears had begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. 

You know the story: pro-suffrage activists descended on Nashville in the summer of 1920, hoping to whip state legislators’ votes onto the right side of history. Timing was crucial: the suffragists needed just one more state to ratify the 19th Amendment, and they dedicated the remainder of their money and womanpower to bring Tennessee across the finish line.

A brave change of heart

For more than a moment, victory seemed out of reach — until a young legislator named Harry T. Burn finally listened to his mother, broke with the anti-suffragists and cast his famous tie-breaking vote.

The rest, as they say, is history; but today, the suffragists’ story is almost completely relegated to the pages of high school textbooks. If the events of the past few decades have taught us anything, however, it’s that all of us should pay more attention to the lessons of the past.

With that in mind, I led an effort in Congress to commemorate the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary by sponsoring the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemorative Coin Act. It authorizes the Treasury Department to mint $1 silver coins in honor of the suffragists who stopped asking for permission to stand as equals alongside their male counterparts.

Both the House and the Senate have passed the measure. All that awaits is President Trump’s signature.

It is my hope that when my fellow Tennessee women and girls see one of these coins, it will remind them of suffragists like Carrie Chapman Catt, who earned the nickname “The Chief” for her fearless leadership; and of Sue Sheldon White, who used her time in prison to organize a “jailbird tour” with fellow convicted activists; and of Lucy Stone, who faced impossible odds as she advocated for suffrage and for the abolition of slavery.

Theirs is a legacy worth remembering, not only for their victories, but as an admonition against complacency. So much was sacrificed for a right that so many of us now take for granted.

For 70 years, scores of brave women were ridiculed by the media, brutalized and thrown in jail. Critics questioned their virtue and their patriotism; many were accused of treason. Primordial concern trolls deemed the suffragists a threat to children and to the family as an institution. The lowest of the low dismissed them as “ugly, un-sexed ‘she-men.’”

They endured all this knowing they might not live to cast a single vote; but they put in the work because they knew that if they were loud enough, and organized enough, future generations of women would pick up where they left off.

Even God-given rights must be fought for

The commemorative coin will above all things serve as a reminder that even God-given rights seldom manifest themselves in the hearts and minds of a country’s people. Freedom-fighting is a calling that outlasts generations.

Thank God, then, for Tennessee women, whose blood, sweat and brains can always be counted upon to fight and win extraordinary battles on behalf of future generations of even more extraordinary Americans.

Marsha Blackburn is Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator.