On October 20, Georgia resident Betty Cartledge turns 82. But cause for celebration came earlier in the week, on October 16, when the 81-year-old voted in her first presidential election.
“I’m 81 today, but Sunday I’ll be 82,” Cartledge told WSB-TV 2 anchor Audrey Washington. “I’m going to vote for the first time in my life.”
Cartledge was accompanied by her niece Wanda Moore, and was seen walking arm-in-arm with her as they entered a polling station in Covington, Georgia.
It was the first time Cartledge had ever seen the inside of a voting booth.
Cartledge told the local news crew that she had never voted before, because her late husband “didn’t think she should.”
In 2023, her husband of many years passed away. Now a year later, she realized that it wasn’t too late to exercise her right to vote.
“I was so young and everything when we got married,” Cartledge said. “I didn’t ever think about it. And then when I got old, I still didn’t think about it, [didn’t] think it would count.”
By the time Cartledge was born in October 1942, women had been eligible to vote for just over two decades (the 19th Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920) but voting was not equal.
Voting discrimination laws kept Black Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and overwhelmingly, women of color, from exercising their right to vote until the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.
The 20th century was filled with other “stops and starts” in women’s suffrage. Puerto Rican women did not gain suffrage until 1935, and although Guam was acquired as a U.S. territory at the same time as Puerto Rico, the 19th Amendment did not extend to Guamanians until 1968.
Some women, like Cartledge, had the right to vote their entire lives. But pressure from the “heads of the household,” like fathers and husbands, has suppressed a subset of women from exercising their rights.
Even some women — who work in the political sphere themselves — believe that women “shouldn’t have the right to vote.”
But those limiting beliefs haven’t held women voters back from being a tour-de-force in modern elections.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics, “women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980.”
In fact, in recent years, women have averaged 10 million more votes than men.
Before Cartledge departed from the polling station, she didn’t divulge who she voted for, but she told her local news station that she enjoyed the experience.
“It was neat, it was good,” Cartledge said, hoping that her first time wouldn’t be her last. “If I’m here, I’ll be back again.”
Header image via K. Latham / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
