Women's Equality Day: If Only

“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union...Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”
~Susan B. Anthony

August 26 is an important date in the history of the United States: On that day 90 years ago, Congress certified the 19th Amendment as part of the U.S. Constitution, and American women officially — finally — won the right to vote. (Since 1971, thanks to the efforts of the late feminist and Congresswoman Bella Abzug, we have observed the date as Women's Equality Day.)

As Gail Collins noted in her New York Times op-ed "My Favorite August," the right to vote was the end result of a hard-fought, 70-year battle. One of the major roadblocks was the U.S. Senate, which immovably opposed women’s suffrage for decades. Collins writes that our resourceful and indefatigable forebears "decided to win the vote by amending every single state constitution, one by one." Suffragists' hard work and pressure paid off when the House of Representatives passed the 19th Amendment in 1918, President Woodrow Wilson pushed it through the Senate in 1919 and Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify it on August 18, 1920 — finally making it law.

But that wasn't the end of the struggle. Many states waited decades to give their assent, with Virginia ratifying in 1952, Alabama in 1953, Maryland in 1958, Florida and South Carolina in 1969, Georgia and Louisiana in 1970, North Carolina in 1971 and Mississippi finally coming around in 1984!

On his wry and funny history-skewed blog Your RDA of Irony, speechwriter Eugene Finerman notes that the U.S. was the last major English-speaking country to get with the program: Australian women gained the right to vote in 1902, with Canadian and British women following in 1918.

So where exactly are we in 2010? In educational and job opportunities, U.S. women have inarguably come a long way, but in other areas we still have far to go. Women hold only 15% of the seats on the boards of Fortune 500 companies, and women account for only 17% (92) of the 541 members of the U.S. Congress. We also lag far behind the dozens of countries from Bangladesh to the Ukraine and from Australia to Pakistan that have elected or appointed women to lead them. And let’s not forget that women earn an average 23% less than men for comparable work; a new study reported in the Guardian projects that, in the U.K. at least, the gap won’t close until 2067!

Adding to the confusion, right-wing anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly is back in the news and Sarah Palin has famously and illogically claimed that feminists have hijacked feminism. As she said on Twitter, "Who hijacked term: 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a singular issue: it's ironic (& passé)."

A few days ago a team of scientists announced they have confirmed the existence of “mitochondrial Eve” — a single female human who is the ancestor of all humans today. She is believed to have lived about 200,000 years ago. I wonder what she’d think about all this.

“I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.”
~ attributed to Sally Kempton

For more information, visit:

• The National Women's History Project
• The U.S. government’s Our Documents page on the 19th Amendment

— by Michele Hush