Suffering for suffrage.

As Women's History Month comes to a close, there are at least a couple of things to be thankful for. We can be glad worker conditions have improved since the Triangle Fire in New York City caused women to jump out of a burning building to their deaths.

And, we should be thankful for the women before us who fought for the right to vote. But we're not. Some 15 million single women aren't registered to vote. It gives opt-out a whole new meaning. Single women could determine the future of many elections this fall. But maybe before anyone can be convinced to get involved in changing the future, we should appreciate the past.

The concept that women should have the vote was brought up at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848. Women got the idea to have their own convention for women's rights after being left out of the anti-slavery movement in England. It only took some 70 years after that to get suffrage off the ground. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the convention, where in a stroke of ingenious marketing, they re-wrote the Declaration of Independence to reflect women's rights, including property rights and voting.

When I was in sixth grade, I decided to write a paper on the first women's movement in the United States, at Seneca Falls. I headed to the reference desk at my local public library in Princeton, New Jersey. The librarian told me there was no women's movement in 1848. We had to look it up together. The student becomes the librarian!

It's an extraordinary part of this country's history that is told too seldom. But the word is getting out. There's a really cool online exhibit of some of the artifacts from the suffrage movement at the National Women's History Museum that have previously been stored away in boxes, as a story on Women's eNews tells it. It's worth a look. And it's a reminder that sometimes great movements do take time to be heard.