CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas —
This year marks 104 years of women's suffrage. It was in 1920 that women were finally allowed to vote.
Voting is what Alice Upshaw Hawkins would call a privilege.
As she spoke to a room of people at the Corpus Christi League of Women Voters' Women's Equality Dinner, the local leader recalled a time when women weren't allowed the same rights as men.
A story her sister told her in the early seventies comes to mind.
"When she first got married, she couldn't get a loan to get back to school unless her husband signed for it," she said.
It was 50 years before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which prohibited bankers from requiring a male co-signer, that the 19th Amendment was signed into law. The amendment allowed women the right to vote.
"Women have already had a lot of responsibility put on their shoulders and voting rights is just another one of those responsibilities that we took upon ourselves because we felt like we could make good decisions, just a good a decision as any man," Hawkins said.
Even though the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, it didn't mean all women had that privilege.
Hawkins' mother used to tell her stories about how she was required to pay a $2 poll tax in the late forties, fifties and early sixties to cast a vote.
She says that two dollars would translate to about $50 today.
"She is my greatest inspiration because she never failed to purchase her poll tax because she wanted to have her right to vote," she added.
It wouldn't be until 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, that discriminatory measures like paying poll taxes and taking literacy tests would be outlawed in the U.S.
Now, as the president of Corpus Christi's League of Women Voters, Hawkins is doing what she can to make sure everyone, man or woman, understands the significance of their vote in every election.
"It's amazing how many people out there are not willing to take on that responsibility, and not only that responsibility, but a right to go to the polls and cast their vote which is their voice,” she said. “If we don't educate people and get them out to vote, that ties into us perhaps losing our democracy."
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