Women’s Equality Day falls on August 26th in honor of the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 that granted some women, but not all women, the right to vote. It reminds us of how far we’ve come in the fight for equal rights, and how far we still have to go. Today more than 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, many of the issues the suffragists fought for—such as equal pay and reproductive justice—are still being fought for today.
When I asked Sally Roesch Wagner, one of the most prominent historians of the suffrage movement and founder of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Center for Social Justice Dialogue, why Women’s Equality Day remains so important a century later during an interview for a previous Forbes story, her reply was, “Because we are so far from equality. If we look at the direction that we’ve come from and the repression of women in the 19th century, when women were considered dead in the law once they married, they had no legal existence, which meant that husbands could will away unborn children. They had the right to beat their wives, as long as they didn’t inflict permanent injury. Women had no control of their bodies. They had no control of any aspect of their life. Once they married all their property, all their possessions became their husbands. So if we look at the trajectory of 150 years or 200 years, that’s how far we’ve come from that tradition, we have not begun to reach any semblance of equality and equity, and we don’t have the guarantee of equal rights in the constitution.”
Lessons From History On The Policy Impact Of Voting Rights
The 19th Amendment is part of a larger story about voting rights. The truth is that even after the passage of the 19th Amendment, barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes blocked many Black women and other marginalized groups from being able to cast their ballot. Laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked some Asian American women from citizenship, and therefore, the right to vote. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 allowed more Native Americans to vote, but states such as Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah didn’t grant that right until decades later. Forty-five years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was intended to remove barriers that prevented many Black women and other women of color from being able to cast their ballot.
This historic day honoring the fight for women’s right to use their voices through their ballots serves as a reminder that voting is a way to honor those who fought for our right to vote, and to keep the issues that are most important to many women voters front and center, such as affordable childcare or paid leave.
If we look at the history of the passage of the 19th Amendment, it helps illustrate the real-world impact that voting rights can have on policy. “When the 19th Amendment was first passed in 1920, lawmakers immediately responded by trying to pass laws that they thought would appeal to this large group of women that were now eligible to vote… If we’re going to be competitive and win votes, then we need to respond to the voters’ needs,” says Alison Gill, director for nominations and democracy at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC).
Gill says some examples of ways that lawmakers tried to appeal to women voters after the passage of the 19th Amendment was when Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which provided federal funding for maternity and childcare and was among the first significant piece of social welfare legislation, as well as the U.S. Department of Labor establishing a Women’s Bureau in 1920 to protect women’s labor and citizenship rights. The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed just a few years later in 1923 to guarantee equal rights regardless of sex (but is still not officially incorporated into the U.S. Constitution).
Modern-Day Barriers To Voting Rights
Today in 2025 we’re seeing a flurry of activity around voting laws and voting rights. Recently President Trump said he would lead a movement to eliminate mail-in ballots, saying they were a source of fraud in the 2020 elections despite a lack of any evidence. The country is watching what’s happening in Texas, as Republicans succeeded in a rare mid-decade redistricting—something that typically happens every 10 years after the federal Census but is now being pushed mid-decade under political pressure to help Republicans keep control of Congress. Some Democratic states such as California are retaliating by redrawing their own maps.
Unlike many European democracies, U.S. lawmakers can draw their own districts, sometimes “gerrymandering” to help boost the odds of their party’s hold on power. Gill says the rapid evolution of data technology and voting records allows for unprecedented precision, making it “very, very secure for [one party’s] lawmakers…and very hard to dislodge them from that seat unless there’s a massive change.” Such practices can dilute the power of individual votes—undermining representation and reducing government accountability. Gill says tactics such as redistricting (gerrymandering), and legislative acts such as the SAVE Act can be used to “suppress voting rights and to keep people from voting, to make voting more difficult, and to make it so that when you do vote, your vote matters less.”
The SAVE Act, in particular, would require people registering to vote or updating their voter registration to show documents in person proving American citizenship, which sounds reasonable but may be a big barrier for millions of eligible voters to cast their ballots, particularly for married women who have changed their last name. Many Americans don’t have easy access to documents like birth certificates or passports, and the SAVE Act does not allow for alternative documentation, such as marriage certificates, to prove name changes.
With women today voting at higher rates than men, restrictive ID requirements such as with the SAVE Act makes it so less people will be able to make their voices heard with the key tool we have to do so, our ballots, and threatens the progress made over generations.
The House has already passed the SAVE Act and if it also passes in the Senate, it would make it harder for millions of Americans with the legal right to vote to do so. Gill notes that “numerous states are considering and pushing forward state equivalents of the SAVE act… At least 17 of these bills have been introduced this year in different states around the country.” Then there is President Trump’s executive order, which echoes the SAVE Act as it calls for passports and REAL IDs, many of which alone won’t serve as proof of citizenship, in order to register to vote.
Steps To Protect Your Right To Vote
Voting is a fundamental right of citizens to help choose leaders that represent their views, push forward the issues that matter most to them, and give them a voice in matters such as which programs get funded. One way to protect our right to vote is to support bills that strengthen, rather than restrict, voting access.
“We need to pass legislation to stop billionaires from buying our elections, not legislation making it harder for people to vote,” said Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on the House floor, explaining why she voted no on the SAVE Act.
Gill says an example of a bill that would help strengthen voting rights is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore key protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, increase safeguards against voter suppression, and and make it so states can’t restrict voting rights without demonstrated cause. The House passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act back in 2021 but it has stalled in the Senate, and it’s recently been reintroduced in Congress.
History shows us that progress isn’t linear, and change doesn’t happen overnight. If we don’t know our history, we don’t fully know who we are, how far we’ve come, and why it’s important to stay vigilant about defending equal rights for all.
As historian Roesch Wagner said on the importance of remembering those who fought for our right to vote, and who dedicated much of her work to amplifying suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage in particular, “The thing that Gage leaves with me is, in her very first speech she said, don’t worry if you face backlash. That’s the result of your work. Just work on— welcome it in some way—because it demonstrates how far you have come. The degree of the backlash is the resistance to the freedom that we’ve created. It didn’t stop her; it just created more drive to further the fight.”