by Linda Charlton
When a constitutional amendment is ratified, does it immediately become part of the United States Constitution? Nope. It takes a few days.
The 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was ratified on August 18, 1918. It became an official part of the Constitution on August 26, 1918. That’s why today, August 26, is celebrated as Women’s Equality Day. That’s why today in New York’s Central Park, in the centennial year of the amendment, the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument was unveiled. And that’s why at a handful of polling places last week, including one in south Lake County, women celebrated that centennial by casting their votes in 1918 period-authentic costume.
In Central Park the trio of suffragettes commemorated in bronze are Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The statue was unveiled on the Park’s famed Literary Walk. These women are the first real-life women honored in the park, as the other females there (Mother Goose included) are all fictional. None of the three pioneers lived long enough to see the 19th amendment become law, but all saw progress in the struggle for women’s rights. They were three women working for a common cause. Anthony and Stanton were white, Truth was black. The amendment gave all adult female citizens the right to vote. It was not a magic wand, however, so the struggle for voting rights continued. Jim Crow laws did make it difficult for black women (and men) to vote, Native Americans in 1918 were not yet considered citizens, and Chinese immigrants and their American-born families were, at that time, barred from the naturalization process.
Danielle Fugler was the south Lake woman who voted in costume. She cast her vote at Precinct 47 at Liberty Baptist Church, south of Clermont, wearing a re-purposed outfit she originally made for a Titanic exhibit in the Tampa Bay area. She is a member of the loosely organized Central Florida Costumers Guild, which has approximately 100 members from Tampa Bay to Daytona. She figures there are 30-35 members who are particularly active and may have participated in the costumed voting, including one other member in Lake County.
“Most of our people either work for museums, state parks, they’re either museum docents or museum curators,” Fugler says. “We’re actually a bunch of seamstresses that are tired of replacing zippers and making people curtains.”
As for the celebrate-the-19th idea, Fugler said it was originally posted on the group’s Facebook page, then basically took on a life of its own.
