Did you know today is Women’s Equity Day? Do you know why it is called Women’s Equity Day?
"On August 26, 1920, after decades of hard-fought advocacy, women won the right to vote, and our Nation moved one step closer to living out our sacred ideal that all people are created equal. On Women’s Equality Day, we honor the movement for universal suffrage that led to the 19th Amendment, celebrate the progress of women over the years, and renew our commitment to advancing gender equity and protecting women’s rights."
I thought about posting this on Facebook, but, let’s be honest, who cares?
Women have been voting in this country for 102 years and has it really changed anything?
Some.
A few more women are out of the kitchen and a few more women are not solely in charge of raising the children, but how many women do we see in leadership positions in our society? And how many women do we see making the big bucks?
Twenty-four women out of one hundred are the most influential leaders in our country - U.S. Senators. (Sixteen are Democrats.)
Does that tell you something?
“In their most recent 2020 survey, the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) estimates that women occupy 29.3% of the chief executive roles in the US.”
Does that tell you something?
Is it progress? Of course, however, one would think that by the year 2022 - 102 years after women became eligible to vote - women might be better organized and would be considered equal. (Another tongue-in-cheek moment.)
So who cares?
To think that it came down to forcing the country to add an amendment to the constitution to make it legal for women to vote is mind-boggling.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was the abolition of slavery in the year 1865 just to give the Nineteenth Amendment some perspective.
So who cares?
Last night, I attended a presentation at the Kansas City Public Library and there were a bunch of people who care.
League of Women Voter people and Stand Up KC people and University Women people sat at little informational tables enthusisatically handing out materials outside the auditorium where the presentation was held.
Emilye Crosby, who was the keynote speaker for the evening, discussed her book entitled A Little Taste of Freedom which details the struggle that took place in the 1960s to obtain voting rights for African Americans in a small community in rural Mississippi. Yes, the 1960s…Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and everything became equal.
Ms. Crosby said things like the above with tongue in cheek several times during her presentation.
Ms. Crosby is a history professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Geneseo, New York
She cares.
She flew from upstate New York to Kansas City, Missouri to give a presentation on a Thursday evening for about an hour and a half to a hundred mostly white, white-haired, women.
Mostly.
There were a few men and there were a few African Americans.
I noticed one African American man who was there with his wife. The couple sat on the back row near me and after the presentation, the wife came up and spoke to the women who sat directly in front of me. They knew each other obviously from some organization or church and they critiqued the presentation openly. They gave Ms. Crosby kudos but corrected her on a few points.
I noticed the husband just stood patiently waiting for his wife to finish the conversation.
My car was parked in the garage and I went to fetch my car and answer a few texts before I started my journey home to Overland Park. As I pulled out of the garage, there was the same couple standing in the parking lot. The wife was talking up a storm with someone else she knew and her husband was standing by patiently. It looked like it was looking off in the distance at the sky. He had a tired worn-out look on his face. His hands were behind his back and he did not sway, bend or move. I could tell his ear was close enough to the conversation that he could have overheard what was going on, but I didn’t get the impression that he was listening.
It felt like he was off in his own world thinking or maybe he not thinking, but just enjoying the fresh air.
Or maybe he was just tired of hearing the same old stories over and over again. Year after year the same rehashing of those days in the 60s. Maybe he had had a “Little Taste of Freedom” at one point in his life, but he just didn’t care anymore and just wanted some peace and quiet.
I care too!