The right to vote… ahhh. We didn’t get it, we weren’t given it, we FOUGHT tooth and nail for it. Way back in the 1600s, a little know FEMALE lawyer named Margaret Brent was laughed out of a Maryland courthouse for asking – no, demanding – the right to vote. She owned property, which was unusual. Then in the 1700s, when Abigail Adams asked her husband to “remember the ladies”, he laughed at her “extraordinary new code of laws”, and reminded her of her place. Hmmmm.
In 1878, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony trekked to Washington D.C. and introduced this radical amendment, eliciting giggles and guffaws.
And so it began and continued into the 1900s when Alice Paul and a galvanizing gaggle of gals picketed the White House; were (literally!) thrown into jail, went on hunger strikes, and SHAMED President Wilson, who ended the struggle in 1920 when Congress FINALLY signed the Nineteenth Amendment – AKA the Susan B. Anthony Amendment – into law.
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 Alice Paul |
THEN, in 1971, that fabulous Congresswoman from New York, Battling Bella Abzug tawked Congress into designating August 26th as Women’s Equality Day, commemorating suffrage!
Battling Bella Abzug