THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF SOUTHEASTERN CT

POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

League of Women Voters Enters Its Busiest Season

By Rosanne Smyle

Special to The Times

          Anna Coit feels excitement about the upcoming election, as many voters do, but, unlike many of us, she has a little more experience in the electoral process.

          The North Stonington centenarian remembers hearing talk around the dinner table in 1920, when she was 12, about the beginnings of what is now known as the League of Women Voters.

          She recalls that one morning in 1917 the doorbell rang as her mother was feeding the five children. She told the lady at the door her mother was busy.

          “ ‘Will you please ask her whether she is a suffragist?’ ” the woman asked. “Carefully remembering the new word, I returned to the kitchen and asked Mother. She did not look up. She said emphatically, ‘Tell her I’m an anti-suffragette.’ ”

          Her mother, she recently told more than 40 people gathered to hear her at the Groton Public Library, “…never really got over the idea of men’s superiority, probably because she was married to such a good example. She had no vote and thought she didn’t need one.”

          Coit’s introduction to politics and history came even earlier, as the conversation in her childhood home in Montclair, New Jersey, often centered on the literary, religious or political, rather than the practical.

          “Even at 4 years old, I tried to understand what parents, uncles and Aunt Mary, a high school history teacher who lived at our house, were talking about.”

          Theodore Roosevelt, running for president in 1912, passed her house in his motorcade in a blocky car with flag on the fenders and on the posts holding the windshield. Her mother helped lift her onto the balcony to see him.

          She recalled early Election Day stories about fraud and advice, such as to vote early and often, and remembered her father asking a local stalwart if he was going to vote for a certain person and the man told her father, “I don’t know. How much is he payin’?”

          We laugh now, she said, but she cautioned the group not to be smug.

          “In our last presidential election, the shape of the holes in some ballots swayed the result,” she said. “We have shenanigans now, but on a larger scale.”

          Coit cast her first vote in 1932 for Socialist Norman Thomas, “though I admired Roosevelt and had seen Mr. Hoover campaigning in our town.”

          She graduated from Vassar in 1930 on the heels of the crash of 1929, landed a job at a department store and later worked at Time magazine where she wrote, she said, with too much help from everyone who wanted a piece of the action, a groundbreaking cover story about Dr. Alexander Fleming and his discovery of penicillin.

          She married Navy pilot Harlan J. Coit in 1945 and moved around the country, keeping politically active, volunteering and joining the League of Women Voters in Atlanta and later in Minneapolis. The Coits settled in North Stonington in the 1950s, buying an 18^th-century house and 29 acres. Her husband died in 1978.

          She praised the League’s efforts in getting people to register to vote and helping to inform them and said, “The League tries to help eliminate the fog in which many voters approach the polls.”

          Connecticut residents can register to vote in the Nov. 4 election up to Oct. 28 in person at a registrar’s office, or by mail with the voter registration form postmarked by Oct. 21.

          Coit particularly seems to disdain the idea of failing to stay informed and participating in the community.

          “We hear about some people, ‘Oh, he or she never votes.’ What do they want? A dictatorship? Don’t they like living in a democracy?”

          She said she understands some people are cynical about politics, but that is something that just has to be overcome.

          “If you want to live in a democracy, you have to contribute to it,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.”  

Rosanne Smyle is a member of the League of Women Voters of Southeastern Connecticut. The League is a non-partisan political organization that encourages informed and active participation in government. It works to increase understanding of major public policy issues and influences public policy through education and advocacy.

Published Oct. 16, 2008