26/08/2020
NATIONAL WOMEN’S EQUALITY DAY
The United States Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women full and equal voting rights on this day in 1920. Every year on August 26, we commemorate this right with National Women’s Equality Day.
Birth of a Movement
While in London at the World Anti-Slavery Convention 1840, several women were denied access to the convention floor planting the seeds for a women’s rights movement. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Staton, along with Martha Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt, set in motion plans for the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Held at Wesleyan Chapel on July 19-20, 1848, the conference drew 200 women the first day. On the second day, the convention opened to men, and some did attend.
Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise. ~ 9th Resolution of the Seneca Falls Convention 1848
During the convention, leaders presented 12 resolutions. They enumerated in the rights that women should be equal to men socially, economically, legally and representatively. Of the resolutions, all but the 9th were approved unanimously. The right to vote created concern. Many women felt it would cause large numbers of their backers to withdraw their support. However, after much debate and the support of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the 9th resolution also passed.
The Right to Vote
Woman’s suffrage began in earnest in the United States then. Another advocate, Susan B. Anthony, joined Stanton in 1869 to create the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Through nearly ten years of persistence and lobbying, the NWSA introduced an amendment in 1878. Despite years of debate and finally to the floor of Congress in 1886, only to be defeated.
