Happy Women's Equality Day

Happy Women's Equality Day, everyone!

It's a bizarre day here in the office as we mourn the loss of our friend and women's rights champion Senator Kennedy, but we are also taking some time to remember the passage of the 19th Amendment on this day in 1920.

The 19th Amendment, which granted the women the right to vote, demonstrates the importance of collective action. Today we should remember and honor our foremothers.

There were those who began the fight: Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone, who founded the American Women's Suffrage Association and began the long fight to bring suffrage to women state-by-state, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Coalition, Susan B. Anthony, who founded with Stanton the National Women Suffrage Association and fought for a constitutional women's suffrage amendment, and Sojourner Truth, who reminded her fellow suffragists that they were forgeting the struggles of American black women in their calls for voting rights.

None of these women lived to see the 19th Amendment pass. A new generation had taken up the cause by the early 20th century: Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw, who led the National American Women Suffrage Association, Inez Millholland, who gave speeches around the country and led the 1913 Suffrage Parade in DC from atop a white horse, and Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, whose "radical" techniques as the leaders of the National Women's Party led to their imprisonment.

August 26, 1920 was a day of great achievement, but it was also just the beginning. As soon as the vote was won, feminists began fighting for more: safe working conditions, equal pay, healthcare, child care, immigrant rights, and more. And it is also important to note that while all women gained the right to vote in 1920, many non-white women were not able to exercise that right until the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act.

We have come so far, but there is always more work to do. We have had the vote for 89 years, but there has still never been a female president of the United States. Women make up 17% of the US Senate and 17.2% of the House of Representatives. Women are paid 78 cents for every dollar a man makes--and that number drops even lower for women of color (Black women earn 69 cents and Latinas make just 59 cents for every dollar paid to a man). We combat threats to reproductive choice, violence against women, and poverty.

So please celebrate Women's Equality Day today. Remember where we came from, what we have accomplished, and how much more we have to do.

Picture courtesy of Library of Congress