On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex. More than a century later, Women’s Equality Day commemorates that historic victory and the generations of suffragists who fought to secure it.
Women have won extraordinary gains in the 106 years since the 19th Amendment. But the right to vote was only one of the many rights women fought to secure. For much of US history, women were systematically excluded from political decision-making, denied equal access to education and employment, and treated as legally and economically dependent on men.
Through decades of organizing, litigation, and political action, feminists helped expand women’s access to education and the workplace, challenged sex discrimination, fought for protections against sexual harassment, and won greater economic independence, including the ability to obtain credit in their own names. Feminists also fought for access to contraception and abortion, recognizing that the ability to decide whether and when to have children is fundamental to women’s equality and autonomy.
Those struggles transformed the lives of generations of women. Today, women are outpacing men in college completion across every major racial and ethnic group in the US, while women are running for public office in record numbers. From the ballot box to the classroom, the workplace to the legislature, these gains did not happen by accident. They were won by generations of feminists who refused to accept inequality as inevitable. Even as women continue to break barriers and make historic progress, those hard-won gains are not guaranteed.
Yet Women’s Equality Day does not mean that women have achieved equality.
“I never thought that in the US we’d have people arguing to go back to the 19th century,” said Feminist Majority Foundation President and co-founder Eleanor Smeal. “It’s the 21st.”
Today, hard-won rights are once again under attack. The right to make decisions about our own bodies has been stripped away from millions of women since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Across the country, abortion bans are forcing women to continue pregnancies against their will, while attacks on contraception and other reproductive health care threaten to further limit women’s control over their own lives. Taking that decision away is an attempt to take that power away as well.
Even the rights commemorated by Women’s Equality Day are being questioned. Some have openly advocated for restricting women’s voting for “household voting” that could give husbands greater control over how families vote. The fact that taking away women’s independent voting power is being discussed at all is a reminder that hard-won rights cannot be taken for granted.
“We never thought bad things would happen again,” said Kathy Spillar, executive director of Feminist Majority Foundation. “We demand equality, no less—but we must ensure that there is equality.”
That fight includes securing the Equal Right Amendment to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in the Constitution. Although the ERA has been fully ratified by the required 38 states, it has yet to be recognized as part of the Constitution. The majority of states have also adopted some form of constitutional protection for equal rights based on sex—or State ERA’s—but protections vary across the country.
Women’s Equality Day should be a celebration of how far women have come, but not a declaration of victory. We can celebrate the suffragists who fought for the ballot, the feminists who expanded women’s access to education and economic independence, and the generations of women who broke barriers in politics and public life. But equality is not guaranteed. We must continue fighting for reproductive freedom, an end to violence against women, equal opportunity and representation, and constitutional equality. Women’s Equality Day is a reminder of what feminists have won, and why we must keep fighting to protect it.
