AUGUST 20, 2009 ISSUE
Celebrate Women’s Equality Day August 26
Everyone should celebrate Women’s Equality Day, said Bernadette Cahill, regular contributor to High Country Press and High Country Magazine and author of Women in the High Country—a compilation of her 2007-08 writings and new material.
Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Woman Suffrage Amendment, is next Wednesday, August 26.
“On August 26, 1920 the United States truly began to live up to its claims of equality. It marks the most significant enfranchisement in the national constitution of any group in the nation’s history,” Cahill said, because women are more than half the population.
After countless campaigns, in 1920 women could vote in 15 states, but the momentum had slowed and opposition had grown, particularly in the South.
“August 26 is important for the whole nation,” said Cahill, and not just because women finally won the vote. It also marks the successful completion of the nation’s first passive resistance campaign, which young women led.
“Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were in their 20s when they returned from Britain, having participated in the votes for women campaign there, determined to get U.S. women the vote, without using violence. Ultimately, they picketed the White House.
“When they continued their peaceful protests after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, the Wilson administration illegally arrested and tortured many women. This turned the tide. Yet, the votes for women amendment succeeded by only one vote,” Cahill said.
Women’s Equality Day’s aim is to commemorate this history, but one of the reasons Cahill wrote her book is because women’s history is largely ignored.
“Women are regularly reduced to a footnote in history,” she said. “A good example recently was the marathon rerun on the Discovery Channel of Walter Cronkite’s review of his career in the late 1990s. Out of eight hours, he gave one to the space race, but covered the Women’s Movement, the most significant social revolution of the 20th century, in a scant two minutes.”
Congress approved Women’s Equality Day in 1971, and Cahill would like to see it celebrated more. She would also like to see March each year used to raise awareness of women’s history. Congress declared March Women’s History Month in 1987.
“Few people know about it,” she said.
Cahill said that in her view, while equal pay and equal opportunity are big issues, women in power is the biggest.
“Only 17 percent of members of Congress are female, and the U.S. is 69th worldwide in political representation of women. In that respect, perhaps we need a new votes for women campaign,” she said—and also a renewed campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which has languished since the early 1980s.
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