Women’s Suffrage

We haven’t stuck the landing yet.

Women’s suffrage is sometimes portrayed as the triumphant end of a movement, the hard-won reward for decades of marches, protests, hunger strikes, feeding tubes. Really, it was a beginning. One of many times America has transformed itself to make the government more accountable to more of its citizens, at least in theory.

The history of women voting is still a history of having representation without being represented. Waiting for mostly male legislators or jurists to determine your access to maternity leave or abortions. Outpacing men in voter turnout in every presidential election since 1980, but noticing how pundits persist in questioning the “electability” of female candidates. Watching as a 2020 field once containing six women slowly dwindled to zero. Settling for a promise by the presumptive Democratic nominee that he will pick a woman to be his running mate.

Changing the country

The Pew Research Center recently published an extensive survey about the 19th Amendment. What did Americans think had changed in the past century, and what hadn’t? Fifty-seven percent of respondents thought there was still more work to do toward gender equality. About 32 percent thought we’d achieved it; 10 percent thought we’d already gone too far. The most jarring number in the poll: about 30 percent of men — 40 percent of Republican men; 20 of Democrats — believed that women’s advancement had come at the expense of their own.

A disappointment, but not a surprise. It’s easy to assume the 19th Amendment benefited women alone, because that’s how we often talk about it: How did women’s lives improve? But we could also ask different questions. Not, how did the 19th Amendment change things for women, rather, how did women, newly empowered, change the country around them?

*Monica Hesse for The Washington Post

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