Women's Equality In The 1920s

With the Revolutionary War raging and sentiments for independence accelerating, our key colonial figures took it upon themselves to make a pellucid, ideological, and an unprecedented declaration of independence from the tyrannical Great Britain. Though this ensured our freedom and liberty from a foreign despot, our Founding Fathers mistakenly forgot to extend those liberties to the one group that guarantees their existence: women. Due to this disservice, women spent over one-hundred years fighting for their right to participate in the policy-making of the United States. However, despite the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, women continued to be discriminated against, further preventing them from becoming politically engaged. Retrospectively,

Regardless, according to Sara Evans, “At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as secondary citizens,” which emphasizes the reason for the movement to pick up speed with the progression of the century (Evans, 2012). Furthermore, she additionally claimed, “According to the Supreme Court, they [women] were not ‘persons’ under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law,” which highlights the horribly discriminatory past females were forced to endure in our past (Evans, 2012). Nevertheless, with the start of World War I came altering roles for women in which they were forced to take over the jobs left by the men. Therefore, due to their selflessness, President Woodrow Wilson called for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to reward women for their wartime contributions. As a result, female political activism skyrocketed, where the League of Women Voters formed to encourage women to become politically engaged (Evans, 2012). Moreover, when World War II took hold, women became just as involved on the homefront and their activism surged to unprecedented numbers due to their new sense of independence and freedom. However, though the voting-age population more than doubled and they were finally given political equality, women had begun to vote much less frequently than men (Wilson et al., 2013). Nonetheless, since the Nineteenth Amendment, women’s role in politics has steadily increased— especially in the late 1900s. For example, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, he nominated the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, to the Supreme