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The Right to Vote... We Women Are Neither Men’s Toys Nor Their Property
Women were willing to go to jail to get you the right to vote. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for attempting to vote for Ulysses S. Grant who was running for president. A movement, demanding women the right to vote, started in England and soon spread to the United States. At the time, there were laws that prevented women from getting an education, making career choices, obtaining a divorce from an abusive husband, winning custody of their children, learning about birth control and inheriting family property. Hardworking women had no legal claim to their money, which belonged to their fathers before marriage and their husbands after marriage. Women questioned the laws and customs that governed their lives. Men made the laws and only men had the power to change these laws. Women realized that in order to have some control over their own lives, they needed to have a voice and that meant having the right to vote.
Alice Paul is shown here, toasting the flag with the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. Alice Paul, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward, Josephine Ruffin, Carrie Chapman Catt, Frances Willard, Mary Church Terrell, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Anna Howard Shaw, are just a few of the many, many women who marched, picketed, went on hunger strikes and were even willing to spend time in jail to earn the right to vote.
All kinds of arguments were made against women having the vote, including women were too irrational and too emotional to make sound political decisions; women are inferior creatures and therefore can not think out matters coolly and calmly; if women became involved in politics, they would stop marrying, and having children and the human race would die out. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment, finally, became law. Well guess what, it is now more than 88 years later and women are still having babies and the family still is going strong. Every time, women or any minority group strives to achieve any measure of equality, the powers that be throw out all these arguments of how much destruction that measure of equality will cause. Again, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!!!.
The Equal Rights Amendment was originally proposed in Congress in 1923. It did not pass. Since then women have achieved many of the goals the suffragettes had set. Except, we are still being sexually abused, raped, sold as sex slaves. Women are still earning less than men while doing the same job. Men still get away with not paying child support for their children. Women in rural areas are still being denied access to emergency contraceptives. Teens and pre-teens, going through puberty, are still being denied adequate information about sex and what is happening to their bodies to make intelligent decisions and healthy choices.
We are equal partners in this game of life. Without us, this life we all enjoy would not exist. We were not born to be sex slaves or door mats for men to walk all over us. Nor would we born to clean up after them. They are old enough to clean up after themselves. We were born to be their partners. And until they respect us and treat us as equal partners and give us the recognition we are entitled to by the mere fact that we exist, we must continue to fight for what rightfully belongs to us.