* Ruth Belcher Dyk; Among First U.S. Women to Vote

Ruth Belcher Dyk, 99, one of the first women to cast a vote 80 years ago and seen in the 1999 PBS documentary “Not for Ourselves Alone.” The four-hour program, created by historians Ken Burns and Paul Barnes, recorded the lives of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their long campaign to win women the right to vote. “This was our big time,” Dyk said of the first day women ever voted for president, Nov. 2, 1920. A lifelong Democrat, Dyk said: “I was terribly frightened that I would push the wrong lever. I still go into that booth with that same feeling--what if I vote Republican?” But she mused toward the program’s end that women’s lives “haven’t been changed as much as we’d hoped for.” Dyk campaigned for Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. senator from New York, assuring a rally in Seneca Falls: “If I have learned one thing, it is that New York needs a woman’s touch.” Educated at Wellesley and Simmons colleges, the Universities of Wisconsin and California and Tufts Medical School, Dyk was a psychiatric social worker who taught at the State University of New York and wrote three books. On Saturday in Rochester, N.Y.