Fight for Gender Equality Continues with New HERvotes Campaign

This week, I’m especially proud to be a woman.

Today marks the 91^stanniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the groundbreaking Constitutional amendment that gave women equal rights at the polling booths.

To celebrate this year’s anniversary—deemed Women’s Equality Day—an impressive coalition of women’s rights organizations have joined to launch HERvotes, an effort kicked off earlier this week to help protect women's Health and Economic Rights (HER rights) through purposeful voting at the polls.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and co-founder of family issues group MomsRising, described the initiative as an effort "urging women and mothers across the nation to vote [because] it's time to stop attacks on women's economic and health security."

“Our nation didn't become strong by putting families last,” Rowe-Finkbeiner says. “For the good of our nation, it's time to stop attacks on women's economic and health security.”

HERvotes has published a list of ten specific women's rights advances that are under attack. Those include the same right granted under the Nineteenth Amendment—the right to vote—which is being threatened by pieces of voter ID legislation that unfairly target women.

(Map: Has Your State Passed a Voter ID Law?)

Other threats to women’s rights include the upcoming expiration of the Violence Against Women Act, legislation to criminalize abortions, and rulings that have weakened employment discrimination laws.

Joan Entmacher, vice president of the National Women’s Law Center noted that "women have yet to achieve economic equality.”

“But the long and continuing fight for women's rights has produced real gains—and they're now under attack,” said Entmacher, also a member of the HERvotes campaign, which will last through the November 2012 election.

America’s come a long way since 1920, when women gained the right to vote. At the time, a number of women turned to civil disobedience, including picketing the White House and going to jail. (Sound familiar?) Arguments against women’s right to vote were misogynistic, deeply personal, and dehumanizing to half of the population.

In an effort to bring humor to long, hard struggle, Alice Duer Miller mirrored their attacks like many good satirists—by applying the same logic to the idea of men’s suffrage in her 1915 tongue-in-cheek piece “Why We Don’t Want Men to Vote.”

Her parody included quips like “Because a man’s place is in the army” and “Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government.”

Nearly a century later, the fight for equality isn’t over—but there are still successes to celebrate.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, the first Hispanic woman to serve in a cabinet position, highlighted the growing number of women in U.S. leadership positions.

“Women now represent a record 17 members of the United States Senate, three justices on the Supreme Court, 74 generals in the U.S. armed forces and seven Cabinet-level positions in the most diverse presidential administration in American history,” she said in a statement. “One in four state legislators is now a woman, 71 women hold statewide elective office and more than half of the states have elected a woman governor.”

Obama officially declared today Women’s Equality Day, asking Americans to “celebrate the achievements of women and recommit ourselves to the goal of gender equality in this country.”

Emily Wood is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow her on Twitter @em_nicole55.

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