How to Celebrate Women's Equality Day

^{Category: Gender and Sexuality}

It took women a very long time to win voting rights; when Abigail Adams wrote her husband John in 1776, asking that the Continental Congress grant suffrage to women, he famously ridiculed her. When the first major women's rights conference assembled in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 and issued a Declaration of Sentiments patterned after the Declaration of Independence, the passionate statement (which spoke of "this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation"), it was soon overshadowed by the American Civil War. It was not until August 26th, 1920 that women could finally vote in national elections.

In 1971, Bella Abzug successfully lobbied Congress to mark the occasion by declaring August 26th to be Women's Equality Day. This year, NOW celebrates with a petition drive calling on the 2008 presidential candidates to respect women's rights. Among the demands to be found in this new declaration of sentiments:

• Passing pay equity legislation, to reduce the wage gap.
• Protecting women's reproductive rights.
• Ending the recent spate of attacks on Title IX funding, and improving Title IX enforcement.
• Protecting Social Security, and making it more gender-equitable.
• Improving health care.
• Reforming social welfare programs to make them more humane, and to provide greater opportunity for educational advancement.
• Funding child care assistance programs.
• Protecting overtime pay.
• Opposing anti-progressive court nominees.
• Fully funding and enforcing the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
• Protecting marriage rights for same-sex couples.
• Reforming immigration policy so that it is less punitive and more fair.

That's a tall order, but then the feminist movement has been nothing if not a history of tall orders. It's not at all clear that some pie-in-the-sky Internet petition will have much influence, but then the 1848 women's rights convention that we accept today as an important event was considered a laughable exercise in futility at the time. Nobody would have referred to it as such 72 years later. Relevance is about the past and present; the unrealized future is always beyond our grasp, always "irrelevant." That's what makes it the unrealized future. So if you agree with these sentiments, sign the petition and let the 2008 presidential candidates know where you stand. Most of them probably won't listen--after all, John Adams didn't--but if there's one thing we can learn from Seneca Falls, it's that there's something to be said for just making your views known.

See also:

• The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments
• Women's Equality Day
• A History of the Suffrage Movement