Picture this: you’re standing on the coast looking out onto Liberty Island and you see women. Women are scaling the Statue of Liberty to hang several 40-foot banners from her crown. Not far away, more women are banning together to stop the ticker at the American Stock Exchange. More than 100,000 women are coming together to protest in 90 major cities across the country.
What are they fighting for? It’s seemingly simple: equality.
August 26 marks the 40th National Women’s Equality Day in the United States. This date was selected to honor the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote.
There were many different leads I could have taken to write this piece. I thought to myself, have we achieved equality as women? Is there a glass ceiling over women politician’s heads? Are we destined to arrange our lives around our child-bearing years? But none of these questions appealed to me. Frankly, I didn’t want to talk about them.
My instinct for Women’s Equality Day is to be celebratory! There is so much that we could focus on that reinforces how much more work we have to do, but the day to discuss that is every day. On Women’s Equality Day, we should step back and applaud what the women before us have done to pave our path towards equality. Every day, I see my peers, mere college students, who push boundaries, rock the boat and break rules on a college campus just to raise awareness—these women deserve applause. The moms and dads, who raise their children to respect women and see sex equality as the same fundamental lesson as their ABC’s—these women and men deserve applause. And then, of course, there are the valiant, highly recognized and awarded women activists that, for dedicating their lives to women’s equality and raising awareness, deserve applause.
Join these women on Sunday, August 28 at 9 pm EST for Fem2.0’s next Twitterchat. For Women’s Equality day, we all deserve a pat on the back. For one day, be nothing but proud to be a woman who has successfully fought for women’s equality.
Photo Credit @ellisisland
