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woman suffrage

2 min read
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Pins from the 70’s and 80’s from marches.

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Pins form the early 1900’s and a postcard from the suffragette movement.

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Thousands of men and women of all ages and ethnicities stood shoulder-to-shoulder as they carried signs down Independence Avenue during Women’s March in Washington, DC on Saturday, Jan. 21. 2017.

As the nation approaches the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, I can’t help but think back to experiences during my adolescence.

From 1975 to 1986, my mother Margie Quigley Van Kirk was the president of the Beaver County chapter of the National Organization for Women, or NOW. I would, on occasion, travel with my mother and others activists on buses to Illinois and Washington, D.C., where we carried signs and banners. We marched to the White House while chanting “Hey! Hey! What do you say? Ratify the ERA!”

It was thrilling to spend time with my mother and understand a woman’s place in the world. But I didn’t realize at the time the importance of fighting for equality.

I didn’t know then that the woman suffrage movement endured a long, hard-fought battle that lasted almost a century. Activists raised public awareness with picketing, marches and hunger strikes. Protests were met with violence and jail.

Some of the key figures in the movement were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and Carrie Chapman Catt.

After the passing of the 19th Amendment, the next step was to gain full civil and humans rights, equal to men. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens, regardless of sex. It would federally guarantee equal pay.

The ERA was first proposed in 1923, by Alice Paul, but didn’t pass by Congress until 1972. Congress had originally set a ratification deadline of March 22, 1979, for the state legislatures to consider the ERA.  As the deadline approached, President Jimmy Carter and Congress extended the deadline by three years to 1982, but the amendment fell short by three states.

The 13 states that still have not ratified the ERA are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.

With the of the rise of the #MeToo Movement, the ERA has been back in the spotlight. There is a renewed push for Constitutional protections against sexual discrimination. Democrats have pushed legislation to either remove the ratification deadline or start over, but both proposals have languished.

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