When someone celebrates a milestone birthday, you will often see gifts and games centered around the theme of “the year you were born...” What usually follows is a series of facts and figures about what life was like that year – how much a gallon of milk cost, what you paid to mail a letter, who won the World Series, who sat in the Oval Office, and what important events reshaped society.
For anyone celebrating a 100th birthday this year, back in 1920, milk was about $0.60 a gallon, a stamp cost 2 cents, Cleveland defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series, and Woodrow Wilson was President. As for events that reshaped society that year, two stand out to me. One is that the first commercial radio station began broadcasting, marking a turning point in how people received information and news. The second is that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote.
How far we have come.
That the 19th Amendment was ratified in the same year that a woman was practically running the U.S. presidency is almost poetic. In the fall of 1919, President Wilson suffered a stroke. The First Lady, Edith Wilson, was fiercely protective of him and became, in her own words, a “steward” of the office, deciding which matters were important enough to be presented to her husband. However, some historians go so far as to call her a “de-facto” president of the United States who functioned essentially as the nation’s executive until her husband’s term ended in 1921.
One-hundred years later, no woman has served as president or vice president of the United States. It wasn’t until 1984 that a woman even appeared on a major political party’s presidential ticket, when Geraldine Ferraro was a vice presidential candidate. In more recent years, several women have appeared on the presidential and vice presidential ballot. Sarah Palin was a vice presidential candidate in 2008, and Hillary Clinton was the first female presidential candidate in 2016. History was again made last week when news broke that for the first time, a woman of color will appear on a major party’s presidential ticket.
The right to appear on the ballot could not have happened without first the right to go to the ballot box. On Aug. 26, we will celebrate the centennial anniversary of the day the 19th Amendment officially became a part of the United States Constitution. It will highlight a journey for women’s equality that started in 1848 when the first women’s rights convention in the United States was held in Seneca Falls, not far from my hometown in nearby Cayuga County, N.Y. The convention marked the birth of the fight for women’s suffrage, and for 72 years that followed, women marched for the right to cast their vote. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” on May 21, 1919, and the U.S. Senate followed a few weeks later. The amendment then went to the states, three-quarters of which needed to approve the amendment for it to be added to the Constitution. Supporters would not celebrate an ultimate victory until more than a year later when Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.
We see the spirit of the women’s suffrage movement continue today as the fight for women’s equality rages on. Women still earn less in the workplace than their male counterparts. Women still are not equally represented in elected office, although more women are running now than ever before, and for higher and higher positions. The fight continues.
The 1920s were indeed a decade of great change, and here we stand 100 years later on the precipice of more great change. Right now, with our day-to-day lives consumed with fighting COVID-19 and worrying about what the immediate future holds, 2020 is understandably being labeled by its challenges, but I for one think in the long run this year is going to be marked in the history books as the beginning of a new era in American culture. The fight for not only women’s equality, but also equality for all, is upon us, and we all play a role.
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