On the Shoulders of Great Women

In order to appreciate how far we’ve come, we need to acknowledge the giants whose shoulders gave us the boost we needed to reach new heights.

The suffrage movement in the U.S. actually started as part of the international movement to abolish slavery 80 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. After the Civil War ended, women were casually left out of the text of the 14th Amendment in 1868, which only gave black men the right to vote.

Not all women were upset by this action either. Just as not all women were in favor of abolition, not all women were for suffrage. That’s not just within the United States either; anti-suffrage cartoons from Britain were particularly colorful and graphic in their distaste for the women who wanted political rights.

However, in the 1920s both the U.S. and Britain followed the example set by the likes of New Zealand, Finland, Norway and Denmark (just to name a few) and began allowing women to make their voices heard at the polls.

But the fight for equality didn’t end with women’s ability to cast a ballot and elect officials to government; women spent the next 50 years carving out small places for themselves in the paid workforce, in higher education, civil and military service, and political offices among others. Women fought for legal equality with men over rights to property, custody rights to their children (and financial support) after divorce, and even fought for reproductive rights (both single and married women).

In the 1970s women rose up once more claiming that as a group we still weren’t equal with our male counterparts. Despite getting rid of some of the blatant forms of discrimination and inequality, women were still being treated differently, negatively, just on account of being female.

Women’s rights activists from all around the country held a federally funded National Women’s Conference in 1977 dedicated to discussion and political action towards eliminating all forms of discrimination and oppression against women.

It was during that conference where the fight for equality fragmented, without one clearly identifiable restriction that could be remedied with one piece of legislation. Women no longer agreed with each other as one monolithic group.

The multiple issues affecting women’s lives - same sex rights, reproductive rights, workplace equality or racial equality, were (and still are) complex and intersecting issues that impacted different groups of women in various ways, and what was the most pressing for one group wasn’t necessarily the most pressing for another. Newscasters covering the conference pointed and laughed claiming that women couldn’t agree on anything, called the women at the conference catty and the whole thing a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The funny thing is, though women were chastised for their lack of cohesion over the question, “what do women want?,” when you think about it - what one issue do men all agree on? (If there is one, we couldn’t identify it before publication).

Although the fight for equality turned out to be a much more complex and lengthy undertaking than what either movement of feminists (which is a fancy word for people who fight for women’s equality) may have realized, in less than a century, women have made leaps and bounds as individuals and as a group.

The second women’s movement gave rise to wider inclusion of women into male-dominated fields across the board and made people stop and question why there weren’t female CEOs, doctors and police officers in the first place—something that now we take for granted as possible if not common place. We forget that it was these women who shouldered the burden of being arrested for passing out information on birth control (Margaret Sanger), running for president on a ballot that she couldn’t cast (Victoria Woodhull) and calling for a nation to acknowledge women’s enfranchisement as an important part of our history (Bella Abzug).

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