The struggle The few terse words above are from Susan B Antony (1820-1906), the American social reformer and women’s rights activist. She worked tirelessly, travelling miles, organising petitions, giving speeches, and promoting women’s suffrage. Her name may not be as familiar to us as those of the Pankhursts and Millicent Fawcett, but her words here are crisp and accurate. Women’s struggle for voting rights took years and years, with abuse, pain and hardship along the way. The fight for suffrage has been well documented, and it’s unusual to find anyone who has not heard about the suffragetttes. So one might think that a decision NOT to vote should be unthinkable. But millions of people who are eligible to vote in the GE on July 4th will not be putting pencil to ballot paper. People may decide not to vote because of apathy, disillusionment, anger or despair - all these may play a part, and there is much to be explored to understand the current sense of malaise that some people feel.