Every movement eventually becomes defined by a handful of individuals who become monoliths, representative of everything the movement fought for, everything it accomplished.
A hundred years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, we know Susan B. Anthony’s name, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s. As the saying goes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and certainly these women’s legacy is larger than life. But while Anthony and Stanton became the faces of women’s suffrage, the movement’s body was made up of everyday women, and it was the effort of those women who kept suffrage moving forward.
Perhaps to “stand on the shoulders of giants” is too simple; it would be more accurate to say we build on the foundation created by the brave, dedicated women (and men) who came before us. So on the 100th anniversary of women (finally) receiving the right to vote, we’d like to recognize and thank every suffragette whose name and face we do not know, but whose work and sacrifice gave us a better future.
One hundred years seems like forever and no time at all. We’ve come so far, and yet we still have so far to go. Immediately after women’s enfranchisement, women wielded significant influence over the government. According to an article in The Atlantic, in 1921, two suffragist-backed pieces of legislation passed Congress as politicians assumed women would vote as a bloc. The Sheppard-Towner Act gave federal funding for maternal and child care, and the Cable Act of 1922 kept American women from losing their citizenship if they married non-citizen men.
But women are just as varied as men, and their voting reflected that. But without women voting as one united entity, politicians were largely able to ignore them. For a time, anyway.
Then a second wave struck in the 60s, this time a push for women’s rights. Building on the foundation created by the suffragists of the early 1900s, this new generation of women turned out to the polls in record numbers. For the first time, in 1964, more women voted than men, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. And more women than men have voted in every election since then.
When women won the right to vote, they opened the door to women in office — the opportunity for our representative government to start actually looking like the people it represents. For the 1921-23 Congress, there was one woman in the Senate and three in the House. There has been at least one woman in Congress ever since, and today there are 127 women sworn in for the 2019-2021 term.
The suffragettes of the late 1800s and early 1900s laid the cornerstone for women’s direct civil engagement, and we’ve been building on it ever since. There is still much work to be done, but sometimes we need to pause and appreciate the progress we’ve made. So here’s to 100 years of women’s suffrage and to everyone who made it possible, whether history remembers them by name or not. Cheers!
Morgantown Area News
'Sunday, December 22, 2024'
