Women's Equality Day

I wouldn't have known if not for an email at work, at the client site, from the Assistant Administrator of Diversity or something like that. August 26.

My friend Krista's birthday? Tuesday? En route to a holiday weekend and on my way to another birthday? A little bit special, but not so much. Who would have known August 26 is officially designated as Women's Equality Day?

For the record, I'm not sure I feel all that equal but that's another story, for another time. I definitely don't feel any more equal today than yesterday or last week.

But I do have the right to vote, a right given to, a right earned by women 88 years ago. August 26, 1920. It took 72 years to get there, from the world's first women's rights convention in 1848 until passage of the 19th Amendment.

That amendment passed seven years before the birth of my maternal grandmother and eight after the one on Dad's side. They split the difference, but both were guaranteed a voice in the elections just as soon as they came of age. I wonder if my great grandmothers voted. I wonder what they thought of that, the first elections in which they were welcome. The one who homesteaded all by herself and the ones on farms. Did my own grandmothers see it as a right? A privilege? A waste of time?

It seems only fitting and proper that the celebration of women's equality and the anniversary of women's right to vote fall within campaigning season for the presidential election, during the Democratic National Convention and barely a week before the Republican National Convention. Just when I'm glad I moved from Ohio and don't have the ever-present commercials, visits and phone calls urging me to swing my vote from blue to red or red to blue or purple to cowering under the covers.

If not for a movement that started 160 years ago, if not for the Seneca Falls Convention, I wouldn't have to worry about it. I could just sit back, little lady, and let the men sort out confusing things like politics and business.

Why don't I just run and get you a cup of coffee and a bite of pie?

That wouldn't last long. I like to think that wouldn't last long, letting other people, letting men, dictate the issues of the day. A dictatorship within a democracy? And where would "women's issues" lay? Would we even have a genre of social issues known as "women's issues"? The current debates over reproductive rights, the lack of affordable birth control and viable sex education burn my toast and I have the ability, the right, the responsibility, to make changes.

I cannot imagine where I'd be if I didn't have a voice. I'm just not sure I'd have the gumption to make a change, to fight as the suffragists and suffragettes fought – some for a lifetime without seeing women with the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony. Lucy Stone.

Only this morning, I wondered about our democratic process and reports that the Democratic Party tore itself apart in the primary and the Republic Party resorted to mockery and mudslinging.

As I listened to the morning news, to news from the Democratic National Convention and a critique of the McCain commercial with a former Hillary supporter.

As I read the news forwarded to me about who might be more American – the man with seven (eight or nine) houses or the man who vacationed in Hawaii, the man who had cheated on his wife or the man with "Hussein" in his name.

As I scanned the paper to find that the VP nominee took a train 90 minutes each way and was considered "poor" by political standards with a net worth of less than $200,000.

I wondered and I worried and I looked forward to the day when the news would move beyond the conventions and the presidential wannabes to something, anything, else. I took for granted that I had the right to know this information and to make an informed decision in two months, plus a handful of days. I can raise funds for candidates and slap the bumper stickers on my car. I can debate and write letters. I can campaign. I can march. And in November, I can cast my vote.

We weren't the first country where women could vote. New Zealand took that place in 1893. We weren't even in the top 10, but we're there now. We've been there for 88 years as of today.

I'm not exactly sure what we're supposed to do about it at work. How were supposed to celebrate women's equality, despite the email from the Assistant Administrator of Diversity or something like that. In some of the buildings around here, we barely have bathrooms but as the current president proclaimed yesterday, in declaring the day, "I call upon the people of the United States to celebrate the achievements of women and observe this day with appropriate programs and activities."

Bring on the appropriate programs and activities.


Tag: Voting