With the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote coming up, America’s schoolgirls should note how far we’ve come. They could not find a better template than President Trump’s July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore. “America’s heroes are embedded in our hearts,” he said.

You know how his aides often have to tell us what he really meant to say? Well, here’s what he meant to say: He didn’t mean America’s heroes, he meant America’s male heroes. He used the names of 21 men: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, plus Ulysses S. Grant, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglas, Andrew Jackson, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse Owens, Alan Shepard, George Patton, Elvis, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Walt Whitman.
And women? Three: Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman and Ella Fitzgerald.

So, girls, you’re invisible. If you don’t help us get a new president, you might have to build the legacy of women and girls all over again.

Donna Halvorsen
South Portland

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