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…