Obama Is Recognizing Women’s Equality In A Kick Ass Way

Tomorrow celebrates Equal Pay Day, a holiday established in the 90’s that brings our country’s gender wage gap to public awareness. To honor the event, President Obama plans to designate a new national monument to female equality in Washington, D.C.

The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument honors suffragists with the National Woman’s Party Alva Belmont and Alice Paul. Belmont was a socialite and multi-millionaire who used her money to support the suffrage movement in the late 1800s. Paul worked to pass the 19th amendment for woman’s suffrage, as well as updating the Equal Rights Amendment, writing provisions that would eventually be included in the Civil Rights Act and working to include language of gender equality into the U. N. Charter.

The monument will be housed in the former headquarters of the National Woman’s Party, where members lead the movement for female equality since 1929. The party now operates as an educational organization, striving to promote equal rights throughout the country.

Sadly, we are a generation of young people at odds about what it means to be “feminist” or to support equal rights for men and women. It shouldn’t be taboo to be feminist — but it is, and in 2016, it’s still necessary for the President to make grand gestures toward the equal rights movement in order to garner attention.

Though I personally doubt the dedication of some political memorial will make any big strides toward equality, it’s important to me because of the women it honors. The fight for equal rights, pay and social standing has been happening for hundreds of years and has included countless badass crusaders like Belmont and Paul.

Amid the everyday bullsh*t of street harassment and faulty expectations for women, I take solace in their examples: it must have been way more difficult to be a feminist in the 1800s, and yet they still dedicated their whole lives to the fight. I can only hope to be half the woman these hardcore justice warriors were.

Featured image via The White House Twitter.