Women’s Equality Day – August 26, 2022, Theme is “Gender Equality Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow”.
Author: Administrator
Date: August 28, 2022
Women’s Equality Day 2022: Significance
Women’s Equality Day is celebrated to acknowledge and appreciate women and to progress towards achieving gender equality. This day marks the day when women were given equal rights to vote, with this, women also got several opportunities to fight for their rights in every sector of the socio-economic system. This was the first step for women to get equal rights in society, and gain respect. Many organizations, NGOs, women’s welfare societies, libraries, and other institutions organize activities and programs to facilitate the achievements of women and honor them with respect. This day highlights the efforts of women throughout the years for equality.
Women’s Equality Day 2022 is celebrated all over the world to celebrate women’s empowerment and equality. This year, Women’s Equality Day is celebrated on 26th August 2022.
In 1973, the first Women’s Equality Day was celebrated across the world. Every year 26th August is celebrated as Women’s Equality Day because on this day the United States gave women the right to vote. The day highlights the continuous efforts of women to achieve complete equality in society.
Women’s Equality Day 2022 is dedicated to every woman, who has fought for her equal position in this society and to all who are continuing the battle for equality in society. This day is celebrated to always remember how our society has evolved from not giving equality to men and women, to celebrating a day for women’s equality. In this article, we have included the history, significance, and theme of Women’s Equality Day 2022.
Women’s Equality Day 2022: What Women’s Fight For Voting Rights Can Teach Us Today
By Holly Corbett
August 26, 2022 – Women’s Equality Day happens on August 26th in remembrance of the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 that gave some women, but not all women, the right to vote. Now more than 100 years later, Women’s Equality Day is still so important because many of the issues the suffragists fought for—such as equal pay and reproductive justice—are still being fought for today.
“Look at the direction we’ve come from and the repression of women in the 19th century when women were considered dead in the law once they married; they had no legal existence,” says Sally Roesch Wagner, a major historian of the suffrage movement and founder of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center for Social Justice Dialogue. “This meant husbands could will away children, unborn children. They had the right to beat their wives, as long as they didn’t inflict permanent injury. Women had no control over their bodies. Once they married, all their property and possessions became their husband’s. So if we look at the trajectory of 150 years or 200 years, that’s how far we’ve come from that tradition. Yet we have not begun to reach any semblance of equality and equity, and we don’t have the guarantee of equal rights in the Constitution.”
On this historic day honoring the fight for women’s right to cast their ballots, it’s important to also acknowledge the many other converging issues involved—such as racial equity—as well as the untold stories of women from this movement who weren’t included in our history books. There are many women who didn’t get the recognition they deserved; this article will focus on one in particular. Here are some lessons that the first women’s rights movement can teach us about continuing to push for equality today.
On the importance of learning about untold stories…
In the fight for the right to vote, we most often hear about two women who were at the helm of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, but we don’t hear as much about the third major leader, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage was the most progressive of the three. Her strong stance as an abolitionist (she risked arrest when she offered her home to people escaping slavery when she was pregnant with her third child) and her push for the absolute separation of church and state (she said if we lose religious freedom, it wouldn’t matter who voted) created a lot of backlash and caused a division within the organization.
“What happened was [the organization] practiced racism as policy,” says Wagner. “They made the argument to give white women the vote because white women ‘wink, wink, dog whistle,’ outnumber Negroes and immigrants, and women’s suffrage is a way to maintain white supremacy and native born supremacy. Gage was a woman who, during the Civil War, said, ‘There will be no permanent peace until there is absolute equality for each group—men and women, Black and white, native born and immigrant, rich and poor.’ This is the essence of intersectionality in the Civil War. This is not the vision of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. And so Gage gets dropped from history.”
Stories lost in history mean lessons lost as well. When we know about our history, we can learn from the past to find strategies to more effectively organize today. “We have to come to terms with the history of the women’s rights movement,” says Vanessa Johnson, historian and artist-in-residence at the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation. “That’s the only way for healing to take place, and for groups who have been marginalized to feel welcomed within the women’s rights movement.
There’s power in numbers, and in having many voices and points of view. That’s something the movement lost when Black women and white women worked in isolation for the same fight. The most important thing to me about women’s rights and our status in this country is the coalition. White women and Black women and other women of color all have to connect. We have to put our stereotypes and prejudices aside and be willing to really listen to each other, because so much is at stake if we don’t, that none of us will get what we want.”
On how Native Americans inspired a model of equality…
Matilda Joslyn Gage supported Native rights. At a time when gender equality was a very radical idea, she looked to her neighbors, the Haudenosaunee or the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, for a model of a more gender-equal society. Through her Native neighbors, Gage was able to see a world of women having empowered equality, and that’s the energy she brought to the planning of the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY.
“[The Haudenosaunee] formed a thousand years ago, and for a thousand years women, the clan mothers, have been choosing the chiefs, nominating them, holding them in position and removing them if necessary,” says Wagner, who is also the author of Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists. “It’s a balance of authority. The clan mother is the eyes and ears of the people, and the chief is the voice. The voice has to listen to the eyes and ears.”
On reproductive justice…
Both Gage and Stanton were calling for reproductive justice more than a hundred years ago. Fast forward about 100 years when Roe v Wade was passed, and then again to today, where we go backwards after 50 years of precedent has been overturned.
“Gage fought for reproductive justice,” says Wagner. “She said, ‘For a woman to birth an unwanted child is a crime against the mother and a sin against the soul of the child. Every child born deserves to be wanted and chosen.’ She said that in 1868.”
Gage understood that protection of rights were connected, and the right to vote, the right to one’s body, the right to religious freedom were all intertwined. “It’s important to understand that once laws are used to suppress one group’s rights, those same laws can be used to suppress the majority’s rights,” says Johnson. “It just depends on who has control over the law. So when we look at the legal precedent used to overturn Roe v Wade, other precedents tied to that decision are also at risk. It is not just about this limitation of abortion rights, now we are looking at contraceptive access, certain medications, the case of interracial marriage. We really have to pay attention.”
On playing the long game…
Gage and other people in the first women’s rights movement illustrated persistence and not giving up after losing a battle, such as the 1874 Supreme Court decision Minor v Happersett that unanimously ruled women do not have the right to vote protected in the United States of America.
“One of the lessons that Gage gives us is she says, we’re on a continuum in our moment,” says Wagner. “We take freedom as far forward as we can, but she said, those of us who are doing the work will not live to see the results. We’re doing this work for those who come after us. The thing that Gage leaves with me is, in her very first speech she said, don’t worry if you face backlash. That’s the result of your work. Just work on— welcome it in some way—because it demonstrates how far you have come. The degree of the backlash is the resistance to the freedom that we’ve created. It didn’t stop her; it just created more drive to further the fight.”
Categories: Featured, Releases, Slider Featured