Election Day Singalong!: Sister Suffragette from Mary Poppins

Today is a big day, folks! In honour of the giant precipice Americans are standing on, I would like to honour the suffragettes. I think Mary Poppins was the first introduction I had to the suffragette movement, and at the time I thought it was a funny and confusingly quaintism from the past. Now I know that it was so much more than happy, stubborn women singing and hiking their skirts up. It was violent and terrifying and vital and incomplete. The blind spots of the suffragette movement are well encapsulated by this woman singing to her servants "No more meek and mild subservients we!" (Let alone women of colour.)

Yet, this movement was a start and it brought us here. I am proud of the first, incredible, daring step these women took, and I hope that we will make the right choices, today and forever on, so that our daughters' daughters (and our sons' sons and our nieces' nieces and nephews' nephews and friends' kids' kids) will say to us "Well done! Well Done! Well done Sister Suffragette!"

Onward and upward, sisters, to a more inclusive, strong, and wonderful world!


SISTER SUFFRAGETTE
from Mary Poppins

We're clearly soldiers in petticoats
And dauntless crusaders for woman's votes
Though we adore men individually
We agree that as a group they're rather stupid!

Cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sing in grateful chorus
"Well done, Sister Suffragette!"

From Kensington to Billingsgate
One hears the restless cries!
From ev'ry corner of the land:
"Womankind, arise!"
Political equality and equal rights with men!
Take heart! For Missus Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!

No more the meek and mild subservients we!
We're fighting for our rights, militantly!
Never you fear!

So, cast off the shackles of yesterday!
Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!
Our daughters' daughters will adore us
And they'll sing in grateful chorus
"Well done! Well done!
Well done Sister Suffragette!"




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