The busloads of men I had accompanied as a journalist to 1995’s Million Man March seemed stunned by the news media count of only 400,000 men on Washington, D.C.’s mall the previous day. I wrote that journalists at the march must have used the three-fifths compromise in calculating the size of the crowd.
Aerial estimates put attendance between 800,000 and 1.2 million.
The idea of counting a human being as three-fifths human has its own horrors, but at least we were counted. Women don’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Their unenumerated existence explains for some why guns have more rights than the women in our lives.
The historic vote Aug. 2, however, could mark the beginning of the end of the systematic erasure of women in this nation. Kansas women likely looked at the results of the vote and wondered if there was anything they couldn’t do.