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…
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…