Hainesport Women Vote

     The women in my family vote.  We might not be able to predict what we will be doing on the other 364 days of the year, but on the first Tuesday in November, we will go to the polls.
     I was born in 1953.  I cast my first vote in November of 1971.  I was eighteen and able to vote because the United States Senate and the House of Representatives passed the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution in March of 1971.  I was a first semester college freshman living on campus in New Brunswick.  I decided there would be no absentee ballot for me.  We didn't have classes on election day, so I walked out to Route 18 and caught a bus into the Port Authority in New York City.  From there, I took another bus to Westampton.  My father picked me up, took me to my polling place in Hainesport, and I cast my first vote.
     My mother was born in Hainesport in 1923.  She was twenty-one years old in November of 1944 when she first voted.  She cast her last ballot in November 2000.  That year she voted by absentee ballot from her bed at the Virtua Rehabilitation Center.  Even terminal cancer couldn't keep her from voting.
     My grandmother was born in Hainesport in 1893.  Women didn't have the right to vote in 1893.  My grandmother participated in her first election in November 1920 after the August 1920 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed all women the right to vote.  On that election day, she was twenty-six years old, had been married for three years, and was expecting her first child.  She cast her last vote in November of 1976.
     Male or female, if you are age eighteen, you should register and you should vote.  Cherish your right to vote.  Exercise your right to vote.