Women’s Equality Day Is a Reminder That the Fight for Women’s Rights Didn’t End With the 19th Amendment

The centennial of the day the 19th Amendment took possess is no longer the solely ancient occasion to be marked this August 26, which became designated as Females’s Equality Day by the U.S. Congress in 1973. It became on that day in 1970 that over 100,000 ladies—and some males—took to the streets across the nation in a Females’s Strike for Equality, using the 50th anniversary of girls’s suffrage to raise renewed attention to girls’s rights.

This march became one of the best ladies’s mobilization in U.S. historical previous until the Females’s March in 2017 shattered that document—and, love the more most up-to-date example, became both a first-rate catalyst for replace and a spark that aroused from sleep opposition. The Females’s Strike for Equality caught American citizens off guard in 1970, highlighting discontent about ladies’s residing in The US that had been brewing since pioneering Rosie the Riveters were fired from their jobs and urged to transfer dwelling to get map for the boys returning after World Battle II. The organizers sought to map a continuous line between their actions and people of earlier ladies’s suffrage advocates, however they furthermore wished to get obvious that voting rights had no longer resulted in gender equality or equal political energy. Fifty years after ladies’s suffrage became inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, the work became unfinished. As of late, 50 more years have passed and the identical truth remains.

For loads of American citizens, staring at local and national coverage of the Females’s Strike for Equality on the night news became the main time they seen feminism on reward. Viewers witnessed a movement that carve across all identification and partisan lines, with ladies marching in over 90 cities across the nation. The perfect gathering in New York City stretched across Fifth Avenue, 50,000-people deep. There have been radical “Weatherwomen and [more moderate] League of Females Voters participants … sad ladies, suburban housewives, consultants, office workers, ladies of the peace movement, Unlit Panthers and non secular orders,” reported one journalist on the scene in Washington, D.C., where over 1,000 attendees carried a banner affirming, We Ask Equality.

The unique thought became a dramatic union-styled work stoppage. “Don’t Iron Whereas the Strike is Sizzling,” grew to alter into the strike’s leading slogan. “Don’t Put together dinner Dinner, Starve a Rat As of late,” went one more. Madison Avenue grew to alter into “Dolly Madison Avenue” after a determined woman scaled the avenue signal to get this correction. Femininity became on uncover, correct as herstory became being written. “Sisterhood Is Mighty” and “Unite Females” were prominently featured slogans that signaled the coalescence of a mass ladies’s movement weaving together a kaleidoscope of diverse interests. “We’re your sisters, we need your support,” challenged a member of the Radical Lesbians, who spoke at a culminating rally at Bryant Park in New York City. And Frances Beale, chief of the Third World Females’s Alliance, challenged white ladies from much less radical feminist groups love Nationwide Organization for Females to be more attuned—in their policy prescriptions and organizing ways—to the “double jeopardy” ladies of coloration experienced due to their gender and wander.

From this huge fluctuate of feminist groups across the political spectrum, organizers promoted three simple policy needs: universal childcare, free abortion on query and equal opportunity in areas of work.

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In many ways, they were a hit. Strikers capitalized on media attention to rigidity the U.S. Congress and Nixon Administration for replace. In the quick aftermath of the strike, feminists contented (overwhelmingly male) legislators to circulation transformative approved guidelines that modified the panorama for ladies at school, at work and at dwelling—the passage of Title IX of the Greater Academic Amendments Act in 1972 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 are two highlights.

But the Females’s Strike for Equality became furthermore an early crystalizing 2nd for conservative ladies and their allies. By the mid-1970s, feminists would be automatically squaring off in opposition to opponents over components equivalent to federally sponsored childcare, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the deserves of legalized abortion on the federal level following the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court resolution in 1973. The march in 1970 previewed the opposition that became to reach encourage as considerations with ladies, gender and the household—what conservatives would finally dub the “household values” agenda—moved to the center of national debate.

One enterprising housewife, Helen Andelin of Santa Barbara, Calif., urged journalists in 1970 that in want to strike for ladies’s equality on August 26, she planned to raise Birthday celebration of Womanhood Day in its put. A 50-year-used mother of six, she urged love-minded ladies to save on their “most frilly, female costume” and elevate their husband a “savory breakfast with a smile in bed” that day. Most consuming ladies, she believed, may maybe perchance maybe disclose ladies’s liberation, which she feared, “became destroying our femininity that males fancy so noteworthy.”

But popularizing the catchphrase “the personal is political” proved more easy for feminists than altering the basic structural underpinnings of sexism in all areas of business, politics and everyday American existence. The bipartisan enhance for feminism that had made sweeping legislation conceivable earlier within the 1970s rapidly aged. In most up-to-date years, participants within the #MeToo, #TimesUp and #SayHerName movements have underscored the unfinished industrial of the ladies who went on strike in 1970. As of late, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the strikers’ query for universal childcare is terribly pressing.

At this 50th anniversary of the march—as we furthermore mark the suffrage centennial at a 2nd of inconceivable monetary hardship and rigidity on families, namely those headed by single moms—it is time to shift this route and at final tag the aim of girls’s equality.

In honor of Females’s Equality Day, TIME’s 100 Females of the Year covers on the 2nd are on a poster on hand for take hold of with a novel promotion thru 8/26. Rating it right here.

Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow are the editors of Suffrage at 100: Females in American Politics since 1920, on hand from Johns Hopkins College Press.

Contact us at editors@time.com.