19th Amendment

WASHINGTON -- So now we know. The answer to Freud's famous question -- ''What does a woman want?'' -- is: An NTC unattractive statue in the Capitol Rotunda.Of course, not all American women have been heard from. There probably are some in, say, Boise, and maybe others in Muncie, who are unaware that the dignity of their sex is implicated in the controversy about what to do with the cumbersome sculpture of three suffragettes. But this city always echoes with the voices of individuals purporting to speak for people they have not actually consulted.

FOR 40 YEARS, the Voting Rights Act has prohibited certain racially discriminatory election practices and given the federal government supervisory powers over states that used such practices. Before its enactment Aug. 6, 1965, few blacks could vote, making the promise of democracy as hollow as was the promise of liberty to slaves in the Declaration of Independence. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1870 specifically to address this issue, did very little. The right to vote, therefore, must be considered the Super Bowl of the civil rights struggle.

IN 1920, a gallon of gas cost 13 cents, a car cost $500 and Caroline Devilbiss was born in the Uniontown house she lives in today. Devilbiss, perhaps the town's most well-known resident, celebrated her 80th birthday recently. "A friend of mine is 82," Devilbiss said. "I was telling her, `Remember when we were kids how we thought 80 was ancient.' Well, here we are." Yes, indeed. For her birthday, Devilbiss received a booklet about what went on the year she was born. The Summer Olympics were held in Antwerp, Belgium, for example.

Katherine V. "Kitty" Endslow, a retired educator who had taught in public schools in both Baltimore and Harford counties and had been active in Democratic Party politics, died Jan. 29 of cancer at Citizens Care Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center in Havre de Grace. The former longtime Bel Air resident was 103. Katherine Viola Archer, the daughter of farmers, was born on the family farm in Joppa. In 1909, she moved with her family to Pylesville when her father purchased another farm, Fairview, and established the Charles S. Archer Co., a cannery.

THE debate over gays in the military has led many people to worry that gay men and women lack not only military rights but civil rights as well.This is borne out by the history of military rights in this country, which is closely entwined with civil rights.To have one is to have the other; to lack one is to lack the other.The 26th Amendment, for example, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971, was argued primarily on the basis that the Vietnam generation had shown its authority to vote at 18 both by fighting in Vietnam and by deliberating about the war on university campuses.

After some 200 years of women being prisoners to men's notions of beauty, do you know who freed them?Jane Fonda. And she did it with her workout videos.That's one of the suggestions of "A Century of Women" -- the three-night, six-hour special narrated by Fonda, which starts tonight at 8:05 on TBS, the cable channel owned by Fonda's husband, Ted Turner."A Century of Women" is an ambitious and often powerful production, with a virtual who's who lineup of talent talking about the struggles and accomplishments of women in the 20th century.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- In the spring of 1973, the Harvard Crimson asked Elliott Perkins, a recently-retired professor from the Class of 1923, to write a little memoir about how the university had changed in the 50 years since he graduated. And so he did.His perspective was really longer than 50 years, for his father had been in the Class of 1891, and he'd grown up hearing Harvard stories about those days, which in some respects seem farther away from 1923 than 1923 does from 1973.In the 1890s, for example, although central heating and indoor plumbing were certainly available to those who could afford them, they were considered comforts and ''conveniences,'' not necessities.

Kathryn W. Burch, a former social worker and the oldest alumna of Goucher College and the Johns Hopkins University, died of heart failure Oct. 16 at College Manor, the Lutherville nursing home. She was 109. "She missed the 110 mark by 58 days, but what a ride," said son H. Whistler Burch of Mays Chapel. Kathryn Whistler was born at Maplewood, her family's 40-acre farm at Fountain Green on the Bel Air Pike in Harford County, during the first administration of President William McKinley and the Spanish-American War. "I was born at home across the road from where my father was born," Mrs. Burch said in an extensive recorded interview for Goucher College some years ago. She was the daughter of Henry Whistler, a farmer, cattleman and owner of a fertilizer company.

Still Pond doesn't look like a hotbed of radicalism. Victorian storefronts seem to peer myopically into the narrow main street. The general store, both shop and social hub, shares its building with the town post office, which has a single window and a bank of antique post boxes.Surrounded by farmland, nine miles from Chestertown off Route 292, Still Pond looks more like a place where time has stood still for centuries. But in 1908 -- 12 years before Congress ratified the 19th Amendment, which granted women suffrage -- three women went to the polls in this sleepy Kent County hamlet and voted in a municipal election.

MARGARET BYRD Rawson died a week ago, and the stories are still flowing. That's partly because Rawson accomplished more in her long life than any two - maybe three - mere mortals. She founded schools and international organizations. She wrote nine books. She traced the lives of 56 Pennsylvania boys for an astonishing 55 years. She put dyslexia, the learning disability, on the educational map and removed its stigma in school circles. She also lived to 102 in reasonably good physical and excellent mental shape.