The Franchise

Ada Whitlock could not vote on whether Ada Whitlock could vote, and so on the first Tuesday in November she did what the women of the Equal Franchise Society had been told to do, which was to stand outside the polling places all day in a good coat and a plain hat and say nothing at all.

The polling place for her precinct was the firehouse on the south side, and she stood on the far side of the street from it from seven in the morning, when the first men went in with their collars up, until the light began to go. She had a paper sign on a stick that said VOTES FOR WOMEN, which she had lettered herself on the schoolroom easel after the children went home, and she held it against her shoulder like a rifle at rest and did not wave it. Miss Martin had been clear about that. No shouting. No pleading. Let them see you standing there, she had said at the last meeting, in the voice that had carried across every county in the state that year and had earned her a nickname the newspapers used without affection. Let them see you and let them go in and let them decide what kind of men they are.

Ada was twenty-nine and taught the fourth grade. She had come out from Iowa four years before because the Nevada schools were hiring and the Iowa schools were not, and because the man she had been going to marry had married someone else. She had a room on Mill Street with a window on the river. She had a great many opinions and very few people to give them to, and she had found in the society, over two years of meetings, a room where the opinions were not the strange part of her.

The men went in and came out. Some of them looked at her and some did not. A rancher she knew from the school board tipped his hat and went in and came out and tipped it again, and she could not tell from either tip what he had done inside. A boy who had been in her class three years ago, sixteen now and too young by five, stopped to ask if she wanted his coat, and she said no, and he stood beside her for a while anyway, not holding a sign, just standing, and then went off to the depot where he had work. That was the closest thing to a vote she got.

At dusk the wind came down off the Sierra and she went to the society’s rooms on Second Street, where the returns were to be read as they came in over the wire.

The rooms were full. Sixty women, seventy, in coats, holding cups of coffee, and a handful of husbands along the back wall in the posture of men who had been asked to come and were not sorry they had. Mrs. Dixon was there, who had helped found the Twentieth Century Club when Ada was in pinafores, eighty now and sitting very straight in the one good chair with her cane across her knees. Miss Martin was there, in from the last of the county tours, gray with it, standing by the telegraph boy’s table with a pencil and a tablet and not sitting down.

Ada found a place on the windowsill.

The Reno precincts came first, because they were closest, and they came in the way everyone in the room had privately expected and no one had said aloud. The firehouse. The courthouse. The north side. Read out by a young man with a good clear voice who had the sense not to put any expression into the numbers. The room got quieter with each one. Mrs. Dixon closed her eyes. A woman near the stove began to cry without any sound and a woman next to her put a hand on her back and left it there.

Then the wire began to bring in the rest of the state.

Ada would try, later, to explain to her fourth grade what it had been like, and would not manage it, because the thing had happened in numbers and she could not make numbers do it. The mining camps and the ranch counties, the places on the map that Reno thought of as the back of beyond, where Miss Martin had gone in a hired car on roads that were not roads and had stood on wagon beds and talked to men in boots. The numbers came in and they were not Reno’s numbers. They were the other kind. The young man reading them started, once, to put expression into his voice, and caught himself, and did not need to, because the room had begun to do it for him.

Mrs. Dixon opened her eyes.

Miss Martin did not cheer. Ada watched her particularly, because she had wanted to see what a person did at the moment a thing she had given two years of her life to came true, and what Anne Martin did was write the numbers on the tablet, county by county, in a small even hand, and add them, and add them again, and only then set the pencil down. Then she looked up at the room as if she had forgotten it was there and had just now remembered.

Somebody had brought a flag. Somebody was laughing in the hall. The husbands along the back wall had taken their hats off without being told. Ada sat on the windowsill with her sign across her knees and her coat still buttoned and looked out at Second Street, where the men who had done this were walking home in the dark, past the firehouse and the courthouse and the lit windows of a room they had never been inside, and she thought that in two years, in this same town, she would go in and mark a paper, and that it would take her under a minute, and that no one watching her do it would have any idea what it had cost.

Mrs. Dixon was tapping her cane on the floor. It took Ada a moment to understand that the old woman was trying to get her attention, and another to understand what she wanted, which was help standing up.

“Well,” Mrs. Dixon said, when she was on her feet. “Twenty years. Give me your arm, dear. I want to go and tell my husband, and he has been dead since nineteen-oh-six.”

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