Chris Anderson vividly remembers when her father passed away in an accident decades ago. She was in college out-of-state.
“My mother was not able to buy airline tickets for us because the credit card that she had was in my father's name, even though she was working and had been paying a lot of the credit card bills,” said Anderson, now the co-president for the League of Women Voters of South Hampton Roads.
At that time, Anderson’s mother couldn’t have a credit card in her own name. She wouldn’t be able to until 1975, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 went into effect.
“Honestly, everybody in a certain age group has stories,” she said.
The league is collecting those stories as part of a video series and campaign called “Plan to Vote.” So far, eight videos have been published on YouTube, featuring women telling stories of when they faced racial discrimination, were barred from certain professions, didn’t have rights as a person in the LGBTQ+ community and didn’t have financial independence from their husbands — until laws changed.
Sally Clarkson, a retired physician and league board member, stars in one of the videos and talks about what it was like being an adult woman before women had reproductive rights.
“I have experience talking to older OB/GYN physicians about what it was like, and my own personal experience of growing up in high school and having friends disappear because they were not allowed to go to school if they were pregnant,” she said.
Clarkson was 20 years old when Roe v. Wade established a woman’s right to have an abortion in 1973.
Nearly 50 years later in 2022, that decision was overturned. But that’s part of the point of the series, Anderson said.
“Rights can be changed,” she said. “They can be taken away from you or given to you.”
Anderson said she hopes the videos show young people their votes matter.
The league plans to add more videos to their YouTube series after the election next Tuesday, starring older women with stories to tell and younger women reacting to them.
