Women's Equality Day 2022

Today, August 26, we celebrate Women’s Equality Day, marking the date in 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment established that an American citizen’s right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of sex. The Nineteenth Amendment is a major achievement for American women’s democratic rights. But it’s important to recognize that the amendment alone was not enough to protect all women’s right to vote. In practice, the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised White women across the United States, Black women in the northern and western parts of the country, as well as some Latinas.  And yet, racist policies and practices ensured that many BIPOC women still could not enjoy their right to vote. Citizenship laws excluded many Native American and Chinese immigrant women, effectively barring them from obtaining voting rights. White supremacist practices like poll taxes, literacy and understanding tests, and the terrifying threat of racist violence prevented southern Black women and many Spanish-speaking Mexican-American women from exercising their right to vote.[1] Just one year after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, a group of BIPOC women urged Alice Paul, leader of the National Woman’s Party, to push for an investigation into the racist practices preventing Southern Black women from voting, proclaiming “No women are free until all are free.”[2] The continued efforts of BIPOC activists to combat racism and expand democratic rights to all women affirms that we should celebrate Women’s Equality Day as a work in progress—a day when we recommit ourselves to the ongoing mission for gender and race equity. The incomplete success of the Nineteenth Amendment highlights the necessary duality of the YWCA’s intersectional mission: to empower women and eliminate racism. Today, we want to recognize some historical BIPOC women activists who ensured no one could forget that women are not equal until all women are equal.   [accordions id='15045'][1] Cathleen Cahill, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). [2] Freda Kirchwey, “Alice Paul Pulls the Strings” (1921) in Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism, Volume 2, eds. Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), p. 244.