Voting and being counted . . .

      A story in the KIDSPOST section of today's Washington Post offers a reminder that 100 years ago today -- on August 18, 1920 --  the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was officially ratified -- extending the right to vote to women.
      Here is a link to a poem by Evie Shockley,  women’s voting rights at one hundred (but who’s counting?) -- and, below, a few lines from that important poem:

           * * *
     one-mississippi
     two-mississippis

          * * *
     one vote was all fannie lou
     hamer wanted. in 1962, when
     her constitutional right was
     over forty years old, she tried
     to register. all she got for her
     trouble was literacy tested, poll
     taxed, fired, evicted, & shot
     at. a year of grassroots activism
     nearly planted her mississippi
     freedom democratic party
     in the national convention.

          * * *
For additional postings related to math and women and voting, here is a link to the results of a blog Search using the terms women and vote.

Remembering Eavan Boland, Grace Hopper

     Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020) died last week and news of her death has caused me to look back and remember.  In this year in which the US celebrates 100 years of women's suffrage, I am reminded of this poem in the Irish Times in which Boland celebrated 100 years of Irish women's suffrage, a poem entitled "Our future will become the past of other women."  Here is a brief excerpt from that poem:
                         A hundred years ago a woman’s vote
                         Becoming law became the right
                         Of Irish women. We remember them
                         As we celebrate this freedom.

One of my favorite of Boland's poems is her tribute to another master of language, Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1988) -- Hopper was a computer pioneer and a navy rear admiral.  Here is the opening stanza of Boland's poem: