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.
- 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
- 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. Eventually, with women gaining equality, Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in August 1920.
- In 1900 married women were allowed to keep their own wages and own property in their own name.
- Title IX was passed in 1972. This was a law that requires schools that receive money from the federal government to give their female students the same opportunities to play sports as male students.
- Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women could be fired if they were pregnant.
- Today more than 30 percent of all businesses are owned and operated by women.
- In 2015 Capt. Kristen Griest and LT. Shaye Haver were the first female soldiers to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School.
- 2017 marked the first time that the Navy has had female applicants for SEAL Officer, Special Boats Unit.
- Women make up 80% of all refugees and displaced people.
- As of January 2012, women held 15.1% of all presiding officer posts in governments the world.
- Women account for 70% of the population living in absolute poverty (on less than $1.00 a day).
- Over 60 million girls worldwide are child brides, married before the age of 18
- In 2016, just 57 percent world’s working-age women are in the labor force, compared to 70 percent of working-age men
- Women with full-time jobs still earn only about 77 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings
- African-American women earn 64 cents and Latina women earn 56 cents for every dollar earned by a Caucasian man
- 62 million girls are denied an education all over the world, and former First Lady Michelle Obama started shining a light on this issue through her Let Girls Learn initiative in 2015.
- 4 out of 5 victims of human trafficking are girls.
- As of early 2017, 223 colleges in the United States had a total of 304 pending Title IX sexual violence investigations (quadrupled from 2014)
- Women currently hold 24, or 4.8 percent of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies.
- Women spend up to 5 more hours on unpaid domestic work than men each day.
- Women earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees, but only a fraction of computer science degrees.
- The women’s rights movement launched its own fashion craze. In 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York debuted a radical new look: a knee-length skirt with full Turkish-style pantaloons gathered at the ankle.
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