“Only the hopes of women have we…”
Inez Milholland was magnificent, draped in white, crowned with a star, and riding a horse as she led eight thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue calling for the right to vote and protesting the racist, sexist president in 1913. She had ridden in parades before and didn't always come off as an ancient Grecian goddess, but the image she made then, that I received repackaged in the movie Iron Jawed Angels (2004), was a powerful one for me. She was a performance artist, a lawyer, a commanding speaker whose voice helped shape movements for suffrage, prison reform, and pacifism. Three years after that iconic moment, she remained magnificent, her speeches galvanizing huge crowds as she toured the country. But even though she was only thirty years old, her body was failing her. Her voice was powerful, but she suffered from pernicious anemia. She collapsed on a speaking tour and died in 1916, becoming a martyr to the suffrage movement.
I wanted to channel her magnificence one hundred years later as I cast my ballot for the person I believed would be the first woman president. She might not have been the woman I would have chosen; still I wore white and found a Wonder Woman tiara and strode into my polling place with pride and jubilance. I made my spouse take a picture of me outside, and I had this huge goofy smile on my face. I was not just happy about what I thought the future would bring in terms of the presidential election but also for the future of my family. On Election Day 2016, I was one day shy of eight weeks pregnant. But what I didn’t know was that my body had failed me, not in the same way as Milholland’s, but there was another death in wait. The baby who I pressed my hand against my belly to touch as I cast my ballot was already dead. I found out a week later when I should have been nine weeks pregnant that he had stopped growing at seven weeks. And there was no heartbeat.
Sometimes I think back to that day, standing in front of my polling place on November 8, 2016, holding my belly and whispering, “Look what kind of world you will be born into,” and my whole body becomes rigid with grief.
My grief is a strange and tangled tapestry. A picture mimicking a social justice icon just before a failed election is knotted with the picture of a mother excited about her baby’s future, not knowing her baby was already dead. The week after the election when I began to miscarry, my grief over my loss twisted up with my grief over the country’s political future. I remember spending a lot of time in bed with the shade pulled down and mindless television in the background. At times I felt like the sheets were knotted up around me like my dueling griefs over the future, keeping me in bed forever. But I did get out of bed. I did start over. I did both keep trying for another baby and trying to undermine the harmful policies the new president put into place.
In Inez Milholland’s speech, “Appeal to the Women Voters of the West,” she said, “Only the hopes of women have we; and our own spirit and a mighty principle.” I had lost my hope, but my spirit and mighty principle were there, even if it was hard to hear them. I was helped to hear them by witnessing to the spirit and mighty principle of other women in my life, especially those women in the We Pray with Her collective, young United Methodist clergywomen who had written devotions for Hillary Rodham Clinton during her campaign. HRC asked us to continue writing through the end of the year. We posted them privately for the writers in a Facebook group so we could make sure we weren’t duplicating ideas and scriptures. But those devotions became my lifeline. Even though they weren’t written for me, I began to believe the voices of my colleagues speaking to the strength of our spirits and the endurance of our principles of justice even in the wake of loss.
This election day four years later, I am not so jubilant. I am wearing a more understated “Octavia Butler tried to tell us” t-shirt instead of a Wonder Woman tiara. I am holding onto my beautiful living child while also remembering that his brother, had he lived, would be almost three-and-a-half now. The question of what kind of world he was born into is one that is still mired in grief, but also one that requires my hope, spirit, and principle as I move forward in the world. No matter who wins. No matter what losses we face next.
Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a sonnet for Inez Milholland in 1923. It ends, “Take up the song; forget the epitaph.” I will never forget my grief, it has become part of my song, a harmony woven with the melody as inextricably as those knotted up threads in that tapestry, but I agree that we must still take up the song of all those who fight for justice. So I am still singing, still moving forward into the world.
You might be feeling anxious, reliving the 2016 election or just consumed by other griefs. But let us take up the song anyway, singing for justice in the world and peace. May we look to one another to strengthen our spirits, as Milholland did leading the women on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913, years before any amendment for women’s suffrage passed, and as my clergy colleagues did me in their devotions after the 2016 election. And strengthened, renewed, may we cling to our principles, that we don’t become complacent even if we win, and that we keep trying to share a bit of magnificence with this world.
