Women's Suffrage in Peril

by Leah Small

Essay by a VCU student, with a hilarious but very scary You Tube video!

How many women would sign a petition to end women’s suffrage? The Padua High School Pandas decided to in a You Tube video made by Will Albino. Out of all those asked only one person decided not to sign. Anybody watching the video cannot help but laugh. He constantly reiterates and heavily enunciates the word suffrage while asking the students of the all girl school to sign away the right. This happens amidst cries that we should end women’s suffering everywhere. It becomes even more hilarious when the camera pans over a sign which says Pandua was declared “a school of excellence,” by the Department of Education. However, after catching one’s breathe after a bout of raucous laughter, the unpalatable truth remains. This kid is not a conniving cad who bamboozled the ordinarily sensible. These girls are ignorant.

The only thing more detrimental to the female sex than an oppressive society is ignorance. Obviously, women do not have the monopoly. There are many successful and intelligent women in the world. All that I am saying is that we should safeguard the gains of our sex and strive toward future ones through education. If a woman does not know the rights to which she is entitled how can she exercise them? If she does not know how to fight for those rights, how can she contest those who strip them from her? Ignorance keeps women from being strong champions and defenders themselves. The more we do not know, the more cede our greatly improved social standing and impede its progress.

Hopefully all viewers of Will Albino’s video were shocked by the Pandua Panda preponderance of ignorance. For all those who were not, the rest of the female sex implores you to do us all a favor and remember that suffrage is a noun defined as "the right to vote especially in a political election."