We haven't come far enough, Baby
by sonya hammond
This summer marked the 150th Anniversary of the first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. , a reminder that the history of women's fight for equality in the United States has been long, contentious, and incredibly slow.
Young women of today may not appreciate that it took 72 years from Seneca Falls ... and 55 years from 1865, when a petition for universal suffrage was first presented to the Congress ... to 1920 when women finally earned the right to vote in a 'democracy' where the literal meaning of 'all men are created equal' had become crystal clear.
At the time of our belated enfranchisement, women in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, the USSR, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, German, Luxembourg, Canada (except Quebec), and England (women over the age of 30) had already achieved the right to vote, although not without struggles of their own.
It was in 1848 at Seneca Falls that the demand for the enfranchisement of American women was first seriously considered, and the battle for the ballot began in earnest. Only the perseverance on the part of the determined women of the National American Women's party, which staged mass marches and hunger strikes, finally led to victory and the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Today the question of why it took so long is rhetorical. Enfranchisement was a crucial step to our acquiring equal rights, but it was only the first.
We have had to fight for marital and property rights, even parental rights ... for years women had to go to court to gain legal custody of their minor children after a spouse's death. We have fought the uphill battles to be accepted in professions considered male dominions.
We have fought and still fight for equal opportunity, for equal pay. We have had to fight to make the battering of woman a crime, for recognition and punishment of sexual harassment, for the right to make our own decisions about our own bodies.
Why has it been so difficult to gain rights that would seem to be, by any definition, human rights?
The answers are many and interminably arguable. In the process of trying to find them, and in trying to rectify what we can see only as inarguable wrongs, we have been humiliated as objects of ridicule, declared the destroyers of 'family values', stereotyped as immoral, and even condemned as murders of babies.
Along the way, many remarkable women have given everything to get us as far along as we are today. We owe it to them as well as to ourselves not to rest on hard-won laurels.
It has been suggested, possibly by wishful thinkers, that the 'women's movement is dead'.
Not as long as there are women who think, who dream, who create, who are convinced of our equality.
Not as long as we breath, Baby. No matter how long it takes.
©sonya hammond, 1998