Today is Women's Equality Day.
What? Didn't know that? Never heard of it?
You are not alone. Most people don't. Most people haven't.
Why is that, I wonder.
Last summer I ran into a young woman who had just graduated from law school. She was shocked to learn that American women did not get the right to vote until....
Do you know when? No?
You are not alone. Most people don't.
Why is that, I wonder.
Mothers, tell your daughters...
Today we celebrate (or should) the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920.
We celebrate the day that American women...fully one-half of the population...finally secured the right to participate in this democracy, 50 years after the Fourteenth Amendment extended the same right to African American men.
No small number of the women who voted in the last election can remember the date the Nineteenth Amendment was signed into law. My mother had just turned 8. That's how recent it was. That is how far we have come in less than one woman's lifetime.
And we are not done yet.
Movies to watch with your daughters tonight:
Ironed-Jawed Angels. Hilary Swank, Anjelica Huston, Frances O'Connor, Julia Ormond. HBO 2004.
One Woman, One Vote. Susan Sarandon. PBS documentary, 1996.
Not For Ourselves Alone. PBS, 1999.
14 Women. Annette Bening, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Alanis Morissette, Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole. Screen Media, 2007.