Celebrating American Women Gaining the Right to Vote

Too often we take our rights for granted.  Too often women act as though it is perfectly okay to be relegated to second class status, denied the equality of power, equality of self-determination.

It took women over seventy years of organizing and struggle starting in the mid-nineteenth century and culminating on August 26^th, 1920 to gain passage of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution.  The complete amendment reads:  "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Seventy-two years from Seneca Falls to passage and enactment.

The struggle is far from over as the Christo-fascist Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia reminded us earlier this year:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine. You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.

I was a teenager in 1963 when Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" was first published.  When I read it a few months later after it was released in paperback and my mother told me I should read it, I thought, "This isn't about my generation.  We are to hip, too cool, too smart to be trapped like that."

After all my muses were women like Joan Baez and the other women folk singers and beat poets of Greenwich Village, the women who went on Freedom Rides and anti-nuclear protests.

But, by the early 1970s I was a woman and saw just how women were restricted by gender (sex roles).  Even the wild outlaw women who ran off to places like the Village and the Haight.  How women in the movement were expected to run the Gestetener, to make the leaflets and then pass them out while the men made the decisions and discussed the politics.

Upon entry into the work force I learned how men doing the exact same job got a different title and were paid more.  I heard the rationalization, "Well men have to pay when they go out on a date with a woman. Or. Men have families to support, as though single mothers did not."

I learned I could open the door for myself and developed a new code to apply.  First one to the door opens it.

I learned about the Equal Rights Amendment, an elegant statement of female equality in a world dominated by patriarchal rules, laws, customs and religion.

The Suffragists who fought for 72 years to gain the Constitutional Amendment we celebrate to day recognized that simply having the right to vote was not enough.

I think that they, like Scalia, parsed the language of the 14^th Amendment and found it lacking.

As a feminist, in my twenties I came to realize that the word "man" meant males and was not the universal noun including women that I had been led to believe as a school child.

I was an ardent feminist in 1972 when the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced and put up for ratification.

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.^[1][2]

It didn't seem all that radical to me.  In many ways it seemed totally reformist, merely giving women equal opportunity in a society that was beset by racism and classism.

But it must have terrified the right wing because they fought tooth and nail against its passage, using every single weapon at their disposal.

That simple amendment first introduced by Alice Paul in 1923 when it was presented as the "Lucretia Mott Amendment" at the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the Declaration of Sentiments, became a rallying point, a line in the sand for the right wing of this country.
So today we celebrate women in the US gaining the right to vote.  It has been 91 years and still we do not have our equality guaranteed by the US Constitution.

There is so much we have to do and those of us who were so young and brave during those heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s have fought so long...

Yet the struggle continues.