10th Grade Reading Learning Check 4

Don’t Let Them Change You

1. Allegra and Adrienne are indulging in what they call “serious down time,” taking a break fro inorganic chemistry problem sets. They collect troll dolls with wild tufts of brightly colored hair and have spread them out on Allegra’s desk. There are enough of them to constitute a small tribe. Adrienne is an expert with a needle and has created a wardrobe for the dolls: bib overalls, miniskirts, a tweed jacket, even striped pajamas. The two have separated the boys from the girls.

2. “Well, George. Do you want to play?” Allegra asks me. “We’re going to hold a mass wedding. Everyone gets hitched today.”

3. “Go ahead and start,” I tell them. “Call me when the real festivities begin.”

4. I hear the mailman in the entryway, and when he has gone, I collect our mail. There is a postcard from my father. I immediately recognize the ostentatious, deeply chiseled features of the faces carved into Mount Rushmore Memorial. He hates it. “I’m not going to pay money to see the desecration we passes the Black Hills. His message comes to me when I most need it. He could have read my mind. Or maybe it was the hills, our hills rising against the sky like spiny steeples, murmuring sacred messages to my father, warning him that one was slipping away. He wrote a single sentence on the card, in his fat script: Don’t let them change you.

5. I slip a powwow tape into my tape player, one of my favorite drum groups. When they come to the traditional swan dance, my feet tap restlessly against the floor.

6. Allegra and Adrienne have arranged the trolls in two neat columns where they pose, hand-to-hand, solemn pairs.

7. “You can turn that up,” Allegra tells me. So I raise the volume until the air vibrates with drumbeats.

8. “What is that?” Adrienne asks. She is fluffing the chartreuse hair of her favorite doll.

9. “It’s Winnebago music. This is what they call the swan dance.”

10. “Have you ever seen it, you know, performed?”

11. “Sure. I’ve done it myself.”

12. She cocks her head to one side, looking surprised. “Show me,” she says.

13. “It’s not the kind of dance you do alone,” I explain. “Usually there's a line of young girls, moving around the drum like swans swimming in the water.”

14. “Teach us then,” says Adrienne.

15. We push back the chairs and kick a pile of newspapers under my desk. I move in front of them, executing the simple two-step. My arms are extended to my sides, rolling forward like oars dipping in water. They catch on quickly, Allegra behind me, and Adrienne behind her. We glide through the room, peeking back and forth to check our form.

At the time of this speech by Susan B. Anthony, women in the United States were prohibited from voting. Anthony, an early champion of women’s rights, had recently been arrested and fined for casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election.

On Women’s Right to Vote

1. Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.

2. The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:

“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a

more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic

tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the

general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to

ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this

Constitution for the United States of America.”

3. It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government—the ballot.

4. For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.

5. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household—which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

6. Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office. The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, the, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce an old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void.