Op-Ed: Every Day Should be Women's Equality Day

Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Every Day Should be Women's Equality Day

On August 26th, 2009, we celebrated Women's Equality Day, the eighty-ninth anniversary of women gaining the right to vote.

It certainly is appropriate that we honor the brave suffragists, abolitionists, and antebellum reformers who fought valiantly for civil rights for women (and themselves) and changed the course of history. Women like Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and the Grimke sisters, and men like Frederick Douglass, and John Stuart Mill -- as well as countless others -- deserve their place in history with the great civil rights leaders. These men and women forced the founding fathers to find a place at the table of history for them and other American women, and in doing so tapped into a talent pool that has immeasurably enhanced the promise of America.

Because of these pioneers of the women's movement, much progress has been made. We have the first woman serving as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. A record number of women are serving in the United States Congress: 17 in the Senate and 74 in the U.S. House, including 21 women of color. The President's nomination and the subsequent confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court justice adds a passionate, principled and much-needed voice of diversity to our nation's highest court. Women hold prominent Cabinet positions in the Obama Administration including the Secretaries of State, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Homeland Security. Record numbers of women hold Committee Chair and Subcommittee Chair positions in the House and Senate.

All of these developments are reasons to be proud. Similarly, we recently passed historic legislation such as the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which will ensure that women and all workers subject to pay discrimination have the right to seek justice in our courts.

And yet, we have far to go. Women represent 51% of our population and only 17% of the U.S. Congress, whereas 56% of women hold seats in Parliament in Rwanda! Women still earn seventy eight cents for every dollar men make, which violates the claim of equal pay for equal work.

There are still too many places in the world where women are denied the right to vote, mothers are not permitted to work, and young girls are kept from the classroom.

If the Congress took one simple—but powerful—course of action, the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), then Women's Equality Day would be a rewritten chapter in our history books. It would no longer be necessary to measure how far we've come and to see how far we have to go. Most people already think that men and women are guaranteed equal rights in the Constitution. They are not! The right to vote is the only right specifically guaranteed to women. While we have made great strides towards equality in the last thirty seven years (when the original ERA was first passed by the Congress) -- none of those strides are comprehensive. A Constitutional Amendment is the only way to ensure that women's rights are truly protected equally. An ERA would put women on equal footing in the legal systems of all fifty states and ensure that the rights of women and girls not be lessened by any political or judicial trend.

That is why I am a proud original co-sponsor of Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney's Equal Rights Amendment legislation, H.J.Res 61. And that is why I will work tirelessly to pass this legislation.

Source