Every year on August 26th, the United States honors and celebrates Women’s Equality Day. This Sunday marks the 92nd anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 19th Amendment guarantees American women the right to vote, and was passed on August 26, 1920.
The passing of the amendment came after 70 years of fighting for women’s rights. Women’s rights were first addressed at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where more than 300 men and women met at the very first women’s rights convention.
Learn more about the history behind Women’s Equality Day.
Image description: These small silver “Jailed for Freedom” pins in the shape of prison doors with heart-shaped locks were presented to suffragettes in celebration of their release from prison at a meeting in December 1917.
The women, members of the National Woman’s Party, had been arrested outside the White House for protesting against the government’s failure to pass a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. They are considered to have been the first people to ever picket the White House.
In June 1917, the D.C. police began arresting picketers for obstructing sidewalk traffic. Over 150 women were sentenced to terms ranging from 60 days to 6 months in the Occoquan Workhouse. When their demands to be treated as political prisoners were ignored, they went on hunger strikes and were forcibly fed. The publicity surrounding their ordeal generated public sympathy for the suffragists and their cause. Learn more about the National Woman’s Party.
Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.
Today is Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the success of the women’s suffrage movement. Read the original documents proposing an amendment to the Constitution.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled after the Declaration of Independence that called for moral, economic, and political equality for women, at the Seneca Falls Convention on July 19 and 20, 1848. An estimated three hundred women and men attended the Convention, including Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass.
All of the resolutions within the Declaration passed easily, except for the one demanding that women be allowed to vote. Although that resolution narrowly passed, it wasn’t until 1920 that women were given the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Only one signer of the Declaration of Sentiments would live long enough to cast a vote in a U.S. election.
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