Today (26/08/2024) is Women's Equality Day. On this day, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect. This ended the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex. The Nineteenth Amendment was introduced to Congress in 1878. Yet its ratification only came about as a result of decades of agitation on the part of hundreds of thousands of women.
Demands for women’s suffrage were gathering strength in the US as early as the 1840s. In 1875, when the Supreme Court heard the case of Minor v. Happersett, it ruled that although women were citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, this did not mean that they should automatically be awarded the right to vote. This ruling resulted in the formation of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. It campaigned for a constitutional amendment that secured women’s right to vote.
Separate organisations employed a range of strategies to achieve female suffrage. Naturally, the traditional approaches of campaigning, lobbying, petitioning, and filing lawsuits, were utilised across the country. Yet some groups opted for a more forceful approach. For example, the National Woman’s Party staged pickets at the White House in 1917. This resulted in over one hundred women being arrested and imprisoned. Whilst incarcerated, some of these women began a series of hunger strikes, attracting national attention when subjected to forced feeding.
By 1916, almost all of the major suffrage organisations were united behind the goal of enacting a constitutional amendment. As individual states began to grant women the right to vote, President Woodrow Wilson was persuaded to support the cause and the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. It took a further forty years, however, to end racial discrimination in voting. This only came about with the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).
In 1971, following the nationwide Women’s Strikes for Equality, a joint resolution of Congress designated 26 August as Women’s Equality Day. Today, we reflect upon the important achievements of the last century, as well as the fact that the fight for global gender equality is still ongoing.