Local woman joins Rose Parade walk celebrating women’s suffrage
On New Year’s Day Brenda Gant won’t be watching the Rose Parade on TV. She doesn’t even plan to sit in the stands and wait for the famed procession to pass by — because this year, she’ll be in it.
The Glendale resident is one of 100 out-walkers who will accompany the float “Years of Hope. Years of Courage,” an entry created to recognize the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote.
Gant said she was on board the moment she heard from a friend there was an opportunity for local women to participate.
“She was mentioning it, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to do this!’” she recalled.
Walkers require sponsors, so the very next day Gant went to the La Cañada Junior Women’s Club, a local service organization that supports women and children in need and of which she’s been a member for the past six years.
The club was happy to support the cause, so Gant will wear a suffragette’s sash bearing the club’s name. She and the other out-walkers will be dressed in period attire resembling the trademark white dresses suffragettes often wore during campaigns.
“[Women today] literally don’t know how good they have it,” Gant said. “When you look at the stories of the suffragettes, they were actually beaten and tortured and jailed and put in mental institutions, just for advocating for their sex.”
“Years of Hope. Years of Courage” is organized through the grassroots collaboration Pasadena Celebrates 2020, operating under the aegis of the nonprofit National Women’s History Alliance. It features a 30-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty wearing a suffragette’s sash and holding the tablet of the 19th amendment.
Riders on the float will include descendants who have a direct line to civil rights advocates Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass.
Pasadena Celebrates 2020 spokeswoman Andrea Edoria said the float — created by retired University Rochester Professor and Pasadena resident Nan Johnson and a group of dedicated committee members — is intended to remind Americans everywhere of the power of a vote.
“With this float we hope to capture the spirit of resilience, optimism, dedication and hope found in women’s suffrage movement,” Edoria said in an email interview.
The parade float will be decorated with more than 1,000 yellow roses, the signature flower of the early suffragette movement, whose vials bear the names of people resident donors had the opportunity to honor or recognize in support of the effort.
As for Gant, the long march along the parade route will provide a chance for reflection. She’ll be thinking about her own female forebearers, who lived with fewer rights than she herself enjoys.
She’s also likely to reflect on the two decades she spent in Saudi Arabia where, even today, women struggle for freedoms. Although American women have come far, Gant said, there’s still a long way to go.
“Getting the right to vote is just the beginning of obtaining rights. There are discriminatory practices, whether legislative or social, that still exist,” she said. “But if you don’t have the right to influence things, where are you?”
