My paternal grandmother’s voting history, from 1920 to 1976

My paternal grandmother, Grace Shields, was born in 1895 and thus first voted in the 1920 United States Presidential election, after the Nineteenth Amemdment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote. In 1976, two years after the death of her husband, my grandfather Lewis Shields, she told my father she was glad she could finally vote for the Democratic candidate in the Presidential election. When my father asked why she had never done so before, she said she had always voted for the Republican candidate because her husband wanted her to. She knew it was a secret ballot, but she did not want to have to lie to him. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 June 2023)