Of all the depressing statistics bedeviling our nation right now, here’s one that’s easy to fix: When the polls close Tuesday night, one in three women will have failed to cast a ballot.

Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony, two of the suffragists who truly suffered through the long fight to win women’s right to vote, will be shaking their heads in shame.

It’s not as if women haven’t charted historic paths in this election. Hillary Clinton posted the most credible campaign by a woman in U.S. history. Sarah Palin stands a shot at being the nation’s first female vice president.

With a woman leading the U.S. House of Representatives and women gaining governorships across the nation (maybe soon in New Mexico), gender balance in the world of politics has admirably improved. Although not enough.

One woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now sits among eight men on a U.S. Supreme Court that has already displayed its disdain for women’s equal-pay issues in the Lily Ledbetter case. With advancing age and retirement to a nice beach house becoming pressing concerns for some of those justices, the next president’s appointments could create a court that will help — or harm — generations of women to come.

Reproductive health is a key area, though certainly not the only one. (And don’t buy anyone who says the left is “for” abortion. Nobody I know who’s had one enjoyed the experience, but they darned well don’t want the government making such a difficult decision for them or anyone else.)

The health care industry rarely acknowledges the different ways that heart disease and cancer affect women — both in how the symptoms present themselves and what treatments best serve them.

Domestic violence proportionately affects more women than men, though every family in such a circumstance is harmed.

Women tend to wield the family wallet, making economic issues of primary concern to them.

When they try to open a small business, women have always found the doors of big banks closed to them. Who knows how many extra locks have been added since the economy plummeted?

Children’s health care and the quality of a child’s school should concern everyone who hopes to have a healthy, educated workforce in the future. Too often, it’s women who fight the battles to improve both.

But one in three can’t be bothered to vote? In 2004, 38 million eligible women voters stayed silent.

Look, I know, life’s crazy. From the moment the alarm goes off until we hit the pillow again, we run our days like long-distance sprints. Stuff gets in the way. The car breaks down. The baby has a fever.

Still … you can stand in line at a Linens ‘n’ Things sell-off, but can’t stand in line to vote? You can squeeze in a midweek pedicure but can’t find time to select the next leader of the free world?

During the primary, a widely circulated but rarely credited e-mail detailed what happened in 1917 when the suffragists picketed Woodrow Wilson’s White House:

The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking for the vote.

And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of “obstructing sidewalk traffic.”

They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head, and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air.

They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed, and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting, and kicking the women.

It would take another three years before women won their ballots. There are women among us today who were born without that right, who had no voice whatsoever in the programs, policies and budgets — not to mention university admission standards — that guided their lives.

The Linens ‘n’ Things sale is a bust. Trust me and skip it. Postpone the pedicure. Think of the women who’ve given it all on the campaign trail, who’ve smashed the glass ceilings in courtrooms and operating rooms, who’ve stayed up all night with a sick child and no money for medicine.

If you still can’t find a reason to vote Tuesday, do it in memory of Lucy Burns.