Women’s Suffrage Still Suffers

This weekend, barring any more earthquakes and a possible hurricane, this nation will manifest the dream laid out by the Rev. Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC nearly four decades ago this Sunday. King will be celebrated with a rare, but deserved monument on the Capitol Mall that runs from the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial — in the shadow of monuments dedicated to our founding fathers.

There are few monuments to our founding mothers, the women who made it possible for Sara Palin to escape her Alaska kitchen babes in hand, to spend a summer riding around Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire in a million dollar bus to declare herself not a candidate for a lower paying job. On August 26, 1920, women got “suffrage, “ not in the Chris Brown sense of the word, but in the same sense of the word that allowed black people (once property) the right to cast a vote.

There are still no monuments for the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who worked tirelessly from the Seneca Falls Convention in the mid-19th century, until the passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution. Anthony not long ago suffered the indignity of having her face on one of the most ridiculed dollar coins in US history.

Suffrage may be established now, but suffering continues for women as glass ceilings remain intact despite significant recent cracks. Democracies around the world have elected women like former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and current German Chancellor Andrea Merkel as their national chief executive, while America has finally reached the stage where a black man can use the front door of the Oval Office.

Long before I came out to the world as a woman, I came out as a feminist. I have never understood the segregation of women from power at any level, including a government composed of men telling women what they could and could not do with their own bodies. I have never understood a religion that tells women they can not be in positions of power within the church structure. I never could understand why so many women in their later years, wind up in poverty after working harder than men for most of their lives.

That’s why I worked hard for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, back in the 1970s. I worked as hard as I currently work for passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that would end another kind of suffering for people even more like me. Women marched, organized, and cooked to make the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream loud and clear in the civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s. After passage of the 1965 Civil Rights, there was every hope, every dream that women would soon be judged not on the shape of their bodies but by the content of their character.

A half-century later, the Equal Rights Amendment remains a wrinkled piece of paper in the sock drawer of American history. I am woman —hear me continue to work and make this dream reality.

Barbara Sehr