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…
The Entrepreneurial Woman by Sarah Becker ©2018 Alexandria’s good ‘ole boys rarely admit it, but much of the property upon which Alexandria was established—property north of Hunting Creek to a line approximating present-day Queen Street—was first owned by a female. Margaret Brent, an attorney and femme sole, took ownership of the land in 1654. “She was the prototype of what the nineteenth century calls the new woman,” Harper’s magazine said in 1898. Mistress Brent first asked to vote in 1648. Women have come a long way, especially since the 1970s. “I did not set out consciously to start a revolution when I wrote The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan said, “but it changed my life, as a woman and as a writer, and other women tell me it changed theirs.” “The essence of the denigration of women is our definition as sex object,” Friedan exclaimed in 1969. “To confront our inequality, therefore, we must confront both society’s denigration of us in these terms and own self-denigration as people. Am I saying that women must be liberated from sex? No. I am saying that sex will only be liberated to be a human dialogue, sex will only cease to be a sniggering, dirty joke, and an obsession in this society, when women become active determining people….” In this the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, I ask. Who is Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, the sloganeer who said “The Health of Women is the Hope of the Race?” She was a wife, mother and entrepreneur, a 19th century woman with a 21st century success story. Lydia’s business was born of husband, Isaac’s 1873 financial ruin. Mrs. Lydia E. Pinkham, of Lynn, Massassachusetts, was among the first to market over-the-counter medicines to menstruating and menopausal women. Born in 1819 her home based, family owned…