Women's Equality Day
Women's Equality Day commemorates 26th August 1920 when votes to women officially became part of the US constitution. This day marks a turning point in the history of the struggle for equal treatment of women and women's rights.
It has been designed to commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment being adopted in the 1920s in the United States. This act stopped the federal government and states from preventing people the right to vote based on their sex.
Women's Equality Day has been celebrated for many years.
It was direst celebrated in 1973. Since then, the United States President has proclaimed the date. The date has been selected to commemorate the day in the 1920s when Bainbridge Colby, who was the Secretary of State at the time, signed the proclamation that gave women in the United States the constitutional right to vote.
In 1920, the day stood for the result of 72 years of campaigning by a huge civil rights movement for women. Prior to movements like these, even respected thinkers such as Rousseau and Kant believed that woman's inferior status in society was completely logical and reasonable; women were 'beautiful' and 'not fit for serious employment'.
Over the last century, great women have proved these views wrong as the world has witnessed just what women are capable of achieving, from the likes of Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt fighting for civil rights and equality to great scientists such as Marie Curie,
Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall. The last century has shown more than ever what both women and men are capable of achieving, given the opportunity.