Twenty-five years ago, when I put together my holiday essays in a book called Economics Takes a Holiday, I sorted them by month. I came to August and there was no holiday. Somehow, I had forgotten about the Celtic holiday of Lammas, August 1st, the celebration of first harvest. But there was an even more important omission. I failed to include Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th amendment, which can be celebrated on either the 19th (ratification by the 36th state) or August 26th, when it was officially added to the Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal. Man is a troublesome word in English. Sometimes it means a human being and other times it means a male human being. I took four years of Latin in high school. Despite the patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, slave-owning culture of the Roman empire, Latin did distinguish between a homo as a human being and vir and mulier as, respectively, as a male human being and a female human being. Jefferson must have missed that lesson.
The Declaration of Independence assumed an even narrower view of man., It meant a white male property owner. It took a Civil war and four constitutional amendments and several Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act to broaden our definition of man. T
As we celebrate the right to vote, women are once again fighting for women’s rights, the right of reproductive choice and control of our bodies, which we have enjoyed for fifty years. I was married in 1962 in my native state of Connecticut where contraception was illegal. That law that was not being enforced. Fortunately, condoms could be purchased for the prevention of socially transmitted diseases and birth control pills could be prescribed for menstrual irregularity, both of which were apparently epidemic in the state. In 1965, SCOTUS handed down a ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut overturning the state’s contraception blue law on the grounds of a right to privacy inherent in the 14th amendment. That case set the stage for Roe v. Wade..
Only in recent years have we learned the extent to which assumed rights are fragile—voting rights, civil rights, privacy rights, safety rights. A major difference between the contraception ban in Connecticut before 1965 and the new abortion laws was enforcement. There was no enforcement in the earlier era, but now some states have established criminal penalties for doctors, clinics, and women for having abortions—even miscarriages that someone claims were actually abortions.
How did it finally happen after 72 years of agitation that women got the right to vote? The movement was launched in 1948 at the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention with a Declaration of Women’s Rights. Soon that agenda had to take a back seat to the battle over slavery. In 1868, after the War of the Rebellion, as it was sometimes known in the north,, the lesser-known 15th amendment was ratified. It prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Efforts by women to explicitly include gender were ignored.
Four other significant events took place in the intervening years that helped the suffrage cause. One was the settlement of the west, which was less conventional about women’s roles than the east. One by one, western states gave women voting rights. Another was the 1913 constitutional amendment requiring direct election of senators by the people instead of appointed by state legislatures. Western senators had to court the women’s vote, and increasingly, so did presidential candidates in states where women could vote.
The third event was the service rendered by women in so many ways for the war effort during the first world war. They could fight, nurse, or do men’s jobs while the men were away, but they had no say in the government they were serving. A fourth and final factor was the victory of the female-dominated temperance movement in enacting prohibition, passed in 2018. Many men and especially liquor interests saw a link between suffrage and prohibition, but when liquor became illegal even without women being able to vote, the opposition lost its steam.
Back in the days before the 19th amendment, when my great-grandmother was marching for women’s suffrage, there was a split in the movement over strategy. Two splits, in fact. One was whether to over focus on suffrage or push the ERA. Realistically, the ERA would probably not have made it, but suffrage did. Sometimes compromise is the best path. But if the ERA had been enacted as a Constitutional amendment, then or later, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The other split was more tactical. Get the right to vote state by state or focus on Congress and a Constitutional amendment? And the answer was yes. It took both to get the 19th amendment through Congress and ratified by 36 of the 48 states. In August 1920, Tennessee put the amendment over the top by a single vote by a first term young representative responding to a request from his mother.
The majority of Americans value their civil liberties and those of their fellow citizens, not to mention immigrants and refugees. For almost 50 years we have taken these rights for granted—freedom of religion, a right to privacy, the right to vote in free and fair elections, the right to engage in peaceful protest. The right to an equal and not separate public education. More recently, we have added the freedom to marry a person of the same gender or a different race.
When one Constitutional right is threatened by the courts, all rights are at risk. As Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister during the Nazi era, wrote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The 19th amendment in 1920 was the culmination of a 72-year battle. Tennessee, the 36th state to ratify, passed it into law by a single vote, giving the required ¾ majority on August `19th. The Secretary of State in Washington enrolled in the Constitution on August 26th, giving us not Women’s Equality Day but Women’s Equality Week. A fitting length for such a long labor before it was birthed. Only one of the original suffrage leaders was still alive in 1920 but too ill to vote. My great-grandmother Alice Stewart, who was born in the 6th year of that battle, marched in New York for the suffrage movement in 1913 and lived long enough to vote in 1920 and 1924. Given my birth family’s Republican leanings, I am guessing that she voted for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
There are lessons in that struggle about compromising and holding firm, about strategy and tactics, and about the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s dictum that nothing worth accomplishing is ever accomplished in our lifetimes. Therefore, we are saved by hope. As we struggle to keep hope alive and make a difference in democracy, voting rights, and human rights, let us hold up and retell the stories of these past struggles to revive our commitment and determination.
