“The way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth on them.” — Ida B. Wells

I’ve always loved being born on Women’s Equality Day, the day we celebrate the signing of the 19th Amendment, which grants American women the constitutional right to vote. The yearly coincidence is a time of reflection that helps remind me to not just remember and thank those women who fought for my rights, but to examine my own work and recommit to fighting for the freedoms of all women. Yet this year, the day feels different — it comes amidst a wrenching time in our country as our culture tries to process and resist the eruption of white supremacy onto the main stage of politics, all encouraged and enabled by the President of our country.
Growing up, my family taught me that, as a country, America aspires to provide liberty and justice for all; that I could be anything I wanted to be and if I tried hard enough, my country would reward me accordingly. I internalized that, believed it, and have worked to be a part of that vision my entire life. America’s aspirations are made real by our own aspirations, and as I have grown and made political and social change my life’s pursuit, I have become even more acutely attuned to the distance we still have to travel to near that idyllic vision, and the role all of us need to play to get there.
Growing up Jewish, in the South, forced me to develop an early and personal sense of awareness for the complexities of American identity. It helped me learn to listen, to, see and to comprehend the structural racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and misogyny that still plague our country. And over the years it has made the incomplete nature of our work impossible for us to ignore.
Yet, like many, I still feel the stark chasm between the perception of our progress and the reality in the aftermath of Charlottesville. In order to make our future look different than our past, all of us, myself included, have to dig deeper to understand our history. And, more importantly, we must act like we know it, right now we’re falling short, and our country is repeating elements of its dark history that we cannot afford.
The first woman elected to Congress was Jeanette Rankin from Montana, in 1916, four years prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The first non-white woman elected to Congress was Asian-American Patsy Mink from Hawaii in 1964. The first Black woman elected to Congress was the “unbossed and unbought” Shirley Chisholm, an icon from New York, in 1968. Look at the math: a more than 50 year gap spans the election of the first white woman and the first black woman. My history classes didn’t teach me about this time lag, anymore than they taught me about the shortcomings and moral failings of the suffragists I was raised to revere. But in America, it’s the deep grooves and winding contours of those often-ignored details that teach us the essential, complex history of discrimination in our country. We ignore them at our peril.
It’s true that Susan B. Anthony fought hard for the right of women to vote; it’s also true that in her mind, that right should only extend to white women. It’s true that Carrie Chapman Capp argued that giving women the right to vote would help to maintain white supremacy and it’s true that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, soon to grace the $10 bill, sacrificed personally and was a model of courage for white women while simultaneously arguing that it was an abomination that black men might get the vote before white women. It’s true that Alice Paul gave her life to the cause of suffrage and organized the first march in Washington to promote the cause. It’s also true that she told black women they had to march separately.
Acknowledging the complicated history of our fights is critical to making progress on them. Confronting the human failings of those we were taught to revere helps us hold a mirror up to ourselves and our own movements, so we can start to identify our own blind spots, holding us back. Lifting the names of those that history has not seen fit to vaunt, and who had the foresight to anticipate the invisible biases that would hold us back, helps us spot the moral guideposts while we navigate the present and the future.
So we must honor Ida B. Wells, who ignored Alice Paul’s directive and not only showed up to that DC march, but marched with the Illinois delegation who welcomed her. And Lucy Stone who centralized abolitionist policies with her crusade for voting rights, although Frederick Douglas would later call her out for back pedaling at times in her life. And Sojourner Truth, a freed slave, addressed the Ohio Women’s Rights convention in 1851 demanding the same rights and respect as her white counterparts in a speech that fundamentally change the dynamics of the conversation.
In 1920, women won the right to vote. But much like the lag time between Rankin’s election and that of Shirley Chisholm, the Civil Rights Act didn’t pass until 1965, allowing, in the preceding years, immoral barriers to voting based on race like literacy and poll taxes. The fight for Black civil rights was bloody and violent in a way the early suffragists never experienced.
Over the last decades, the growing anti-choice movement has ceaselessly worked to hollow-out the promise of Roe vs. Wade, by weaponizing state laws that create barriers to services, especially for women of color, by shaming women who seek them, and by closing the dwindling number of clinics that serve women. Last year, the movement for reproductive freedom struck a great victory when the Supreme Court ruled that some of these restrictions were unconstitutional. The clarion call at the time was “A right in theory is not a right at all.” This principle remains true when voting rights are unjustly and unequally applied. This remains true when liberty and justice for all is threatened on the streets of Charlottesville.
And as always in our history, the pathway to ensuring that constitutional rights become and remain a living, breathing part of people’s lives requires us to tell our history in a way that shines the light on the complicated details that teach us the hard truths about where we need to do better to ensure success for all. As history teaches us, one piece of this is for white women to confront our own blind spots, and truly internalize the idea that no progress is tangible and sustainable unless it applies to all.
The immediate catalyst Women’s Equality Day came about when “Battling” Bella Abzug, Congresswoman from New York, filed a Congressional resolution asking for the proclamation of the day from the President. President Nixon was in office at the time and when he signed the proclamation he stated:
“The struggle for women’s suffrage, however, was only the first step toward full and equal participation of women in our Nation’s life. In recent years, we have made other giant strides by attacking sex discrimination through our laws and by paving new avenues to equal economic opportunity for women. Today, in virtually every sector of our society, women are making important contributions to the quality of American life. And yet, much still remains to be done.”
Much remains to be done, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. But this Women’s Equality Day, let us commit to not only understanding our complicated and flawed history, but to show through our actions that we have learned from it.
