Existing comment:
Women's Equality Day:
On August 24, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to ratify the 19th amendment. Two days later on August 26th, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed into the law the federal suffrage amendment, giving women across the country the vote and moving them another step forward in the continuing struggle for equality. That fall in the election of 1920, 37 million American women were, for the first time, finally permitted to have a voice in their government.
The work for equality did not end with the ratification in 1920. Alice Paul and the NWP continued to lobby for complete equality for women and encouraged women to run for political office.
While the battle for equality continues, the seventy-two years of effort by the NWP and others to achieve suffrage is celebrated annually on the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. |