by ©2021 Sarah Becker Ratification ERA – 2021 Sometimes fate has a way of writing a new chapter. In truth, the ongoing fight for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment [ERA] has left me fatigued. But now—with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation—for reason of sexual misconduct—the arrival of New York State’s first female Governor, the AFL-CIO’s first female President—the political worm has turned. On March 17, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives again passed the Equal Rights Amendment. My only question: By what date will Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin [D-IL], Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-NY] deliver an affirmative vote? The American Heritage dictionary defines chauvinism as the “prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own group.” The Oxford American Dictionary defines chauvinism as “excessive or prejudiced support or loyalty;” a male chauvinist as a “man showing excessive loyalty to men and prejudice against women.” The New Jersey constitution “granted the right to vote to ‘all free inhabitants’ thus enfranchising women until 1807: when a new state constitution restricted suffrage to males.” The U.S. Census Bureau defined the term free inhabitant in 1790. “Assistant marshals listed the name of each head of household, and asked the following questions: The number of free White males aged under 16 years, of 16 years and upward; Number of free White females; Number of other free persons, and Number of slaves. Free inhabitants were not listed individually until 1850. In one of the colonial era’s few examples of women’s suffrage, Lady Deborah Moody was permitted to vote in a Long Island town meeting in 1655. Of greater interest—to me at least—was the women’s literacy measure. “The determination was made on the basis of women’s ability to sign their names to documents with either an ‘X’ or a written signature. Massachusetts’ illiteracy…
History Written by ©2020 Sarah Becker Copyright ©2020 Sarah Becker August 28th – 57th Anniversary of the March On Washington “The liberty attained by that soul which is converted from evil by the influence of Divine love, is the only liberty which truly deserves the name,” Quaker minister, abolitionist and Alexandria apothecary Edward Stabler wrote in 1825. “The difference between this state, which has been the happy possession of many whose bodies were in bonds,—and mere personal freedom, is so great, that the one may be designated as being of heaven, the other of the earth.” Quakers understood discrimination. In 1656 Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans greeted the first arriving Quakers with imprisonment. More than three hundred years later civil rights activist Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream: “Five score years ago, a great American [Abraham Lincoln], in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation [January 1, 1863]. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice….” “But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free,” Dr. King continued. “One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation [Jim Crow] and the chains of discrimination…[W]e have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote,” Dr. King exclaimed. “No, no we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Justice as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: “fairness, a fair claim; the…
by ©2019 Sarah Becker Woman’s Suffrage Amendment When the enslaved rebelled against their master[s] they struggled. To struggle, as defined by The Oxford American Dictionary: (1) make forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint. (2) try hard under difficulties. (3) contend, fight. (4) make one’s way with difficulty. (5) have difficulty gaining recognition or a living. Do men really believe that woman’s suffrage, the passage of the 1919 Woman’s Suffrage Amendment was not a struggle? “Susan B. Anthony’s self-imposed task, for almost half a century, has been to secure equal rights for her crusade women—social, civil and political,” Ida Hasted Harper penned in 1906. “When she began her crusade woman in social life was ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confined to an extent which can scarcely be conceived. In law she was but little better than a slave; in politics a mere cipher…Is there an example in all history of either man or woman who devoted half a century of the hardest, most persistent labor for one reform?” “We little dreamed…that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the [voting rights] battle to another generation of women,” Anthony wrote in 1902. Susan B. Anthony met cohort Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851; the same year former slave Sojourner Truth delivered her Ain’t I a Woman speech. Women earned the right to vote only 100 years ago, 24 days before the June 28, 1919, Paris Peace Conference concluded. It took a world war, not a civil war for women to achieve parity. In some World War I industries, such as aircraft, the employment of women rose from negligible proportions in 1914 to 19% in 1918. The percentage of women working in other war related industries was higher, almost double. “We have made partners of the…
by ©2018 Sarah Becker Ratification of the ERA “We shall never have equal rights until we take them,” attorney Belva Lockwood said, “nor respect until we command it.” Lockwood, the first female attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court was the Equal Rights Party’s second Presidential nominee, in 1884 and 1888. This month the Virginia legislature again considers ratification of the 1923, more accurately the 1972, Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment, Section 1: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Practically speaking, the decision belongs to the House of Delegates. “The law relating to married women makes the family a barony, a monarchy, a despotism, of which the husband is the baron, king or despot, and the wife the dependent, serf or slave,” The Washington Post wrote in 1896. “The English common law in all its harshness and inflexibility, brought by our forefathers across the sea to this country, had been but little modified by statute…By the common law the identity of the wife in relation to her civil status was almost entirely swallowed up in the personality of her husband…In but few of the States have the disabilities of women been entirely removed.” Enter Quaker suffragist and attorney Alice Paul, founder of the 1916 National Women’s Party. With the Party’s help the 19th Amendment, the women’s suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920; upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922. Slow going Virginia, home of the founding fathers’ Bill of Rights, did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1952. “To get the ‘male’ in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign [1868-1920],” Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the…
By Sarah Becker War & Remembrance Conflict is often remembered by the men and women who cared: for the home front during war; for comrades and soldiers including burials, for the disabled and others. During the Revolutionary War Martha Washington successfully served as the public face of a women’s fund-raising campaign, a national campaign to provide soldiers with shirts. President George Washington, the country’s first commander-in-chief supported “a monument…to the American Revolution.” But for the love of a good woman, George Washington’s Mount Vernon might never have been saved. The restoration effort was born of a boat ride, specifically Alexandria-born South Carolinian Louisa Bird Cunningham’s 1853 Potomac River cruise. May we always remember George Washington, his military service and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union. “I was painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of [General George] Washington, and the thought passed through my mind,” Cunningham wrote her 37-year-old daughter Ann Pamela. “Why was it the women of this country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it?” The Dames of 1846 was established in Texas in 1901 in honor of the Soldiers of the War with Mexico. The Mexican War was West Point graduate Robert E. Lee’s first combat experience. “As the mothers, wives and daughters of the warriors of 1846, we believe that the time is over-ripe for us to commemorate the bravery and devotion of those men who repelled the invader,” Dames of 1846 Founder and National Commandant Mrs. Moore Murdock wrote in 1905. “The notable men and women of our early colonies have had their fortitude and heroism immortalized by the women [National Society Daughters of American Colonists] who trace their ancestry to gallant hands of pioneers in a New World,” Murdock continued. “The…