When The Force is Female

“‘As you know, the Equal Rights Amendment, which proposed banning discrimination based on sex, was passed by Congress in 1972 but was never ratified by the states and therefore has not been made part of the U.S. Constitution.’

This was one of a number of difficult reminders I had as my friends and I followed the National Women’s History Museum tour, an experience fraught with irony given that there isn’t actually a National Women’s History Museum. Instead, a young woman with a three ring binder led us along the route of the 1913 Suffrage parade, through the littered streets of our Nation’s capital. As she stopped to show us pictures from the plastic sleeves in her binder, I realized how little most of us know of the women who fought for nearly 80 years to secure women’s right to vote, including the suffragists who were jailed, brutalized, and force-fed in a D.C. prison precisely 100 years ago. The crime? Picketing the White House for the right to vote. The charge? Obstructing sidewalk traffic.”