It wasn’t until the year 1920 that the 19th Amendment was ratified and women were able to vote all across America.
“In the history books, they keep saying that women ‘got equality’ or ‘got the vote,'” says Ellie Smeal, a leader in the modern-day women’s rights movement and president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “We didn’t ‘get’ any vote. We fought for that.”
The fight took more than 130 years after the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, which originally granted voting rights only to white, land-owning men in the United States. Yet another battle that’s long been taking place for gender equality, also born out of the Constitution, still hasn’t found resolution. The Equal Rights Amendment — proposed in 1923, shortly after women gained suffrage — aimed to finally cement in the Constitution that men and women are equal under U.S. law. But that amendment still hasn’t been officially approved.
The fifth episode of The…
