Dilan Reyes-Hurtado

Congress passed the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. The 19th Amendment basically gave women the right to vote. My auntie wasn’t born until 1985. My auntie is still pretty young, and she came to the United States when she was 18. My auntie told me that she wanted to come to the U.S because my dad moved out here and she wanted to have kids here. She met my uncle when she was in her 20s.

My auntie used to live with me and my family when she first came to the US, I was only a child when she lived with us. My dad helped my auntie find a job here. He helped her find a job in a restaurant. Then once she started making some money she moved out and rented a small apartment close to my house. She felt kind of stressed out because she didn’t know any English and couldn’t understand anything people would tell her. My dad learned English in Mexico, so he helped her learn a bit of English. My dad told my auntie to sign up for English classes in this church. It took my auntie 2 months to learn English. Moreover, three years later my auntie met her husband, and rented a house and had three kids. 

My auntie tried to vote in the Obama and Romney election but was denied because she didn’t have proof of citizenship. She then basically stopped caring about the elections and didn’t care about voting anymore. Till this day my auntie still lives in the same house with her three kids and husband.

Inez Milholland once stated, ¨I am prepared to sacrifice every so-called privileged I possess in order to have a few rights.¨  Inez Milholland was a fervent human rights activist and an eloquent speaker,  and she was credited with greatly influencing the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the US. In many ways, the importance of Inez Milholland to the Suffragist Movement is that she helped organize and lead the stunning Women Suffrage Procession of 1913.

Inez inspired and influenced the Women´s Movement in the U.S. A lot of women supported her when she led the Woman´s Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC. Moreover, Inez was a suffragist, labor lawyer, socialist, World War I correspondent, and a public speaker. This informed her development and her actions because it helped her prove people wrong on women’s ability to become lawyers. Inez advanced various issues and causes by basically ignoring them. For example, since discussion of suffrage was forbidden on campus, toward the end of her junior year Milholland helped draw a large group of students out to a small cemetery near to the college for a suffrage meeting.

What motivated Inez was the fact that she basically didn’t have rights; for example, Inez once said, “I am prepared to sacrifice every so-called privilege to get a few rights.” The fact that they didn’t have rights back then and females were being treated unfairly just because they were women was what drove her to take risks. Inez Milholland impacted the lives of her contemporaries in a powerful way because she embodied more than any other American woman the ideals of that part of womankind whose eyes are on the future. She was aware of being a role model when she helped set up the suffrage parade and she knew she had an important role to play.   

Inez sacrificed “every so-called privileges” she possessed to achieve getting her rights.