MIAMI HERALD 8/30/2010

90 years after women's suffrage, equality issues unresolved

In light of this week's 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, some Floridians question whether gender equality has been reached.

BY LAURA STAMPLER

lstampler@MiamiHerald.com

After months of researching candidates, 19 year-old Hannah Snitzer woke up early Tuesday to be one of the first people at Nautilus Middle School in Miami Beach to cast her vote in the Florida primaries.

Snitzer was excited to vote in her first election. But as a female Florida resident, she would have been barred from submitting her ballot less than a century ago.

This week marked the 90th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. The event was celebrated locally with a remembrance march down Lincoln Road, speeches, luncheons hosted by political candidates and presentations on the life of prolific Coral Gables feminist Roxcy Bolton.

It's difficult to imagine a time when women couldn't vote. Today, registered women voters outnumber men in both Miami-Dade and Broward counties -- where they made up 56 percent of voters in the last presidential election.

FLORIDA ACTED LATE

But it took decades of political fighting for women to see the ratification of the 19th amendment -- granting women the right to vote -- in the United States Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920. Florida's Legislature, however, did not symbolically ratify the amendment until 1969.

A joint resolution was made in Congress in 1971 to declare the anniversary of the amendment Women's Equality Day.

``Women's Equality Day is a celebration of a very long struggle of half the population to achieve the same level of recognition and power as the other half,'' said Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera Bower, who celebrated the event with South Floridians in a march down Lincoln Road on Thursday. ``It's also a recognition that that struggle is not over.''

While this week's milestone celebrates women's progress over the last century, it also raises the question of whether, 90 years later, equality has been reached, some activist say.

``What many people forget is that earlier in American history, women could not take custody of children, could not hold paying jobs, have bank accounts, go to college,'' said Deirdre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

As of 2009, women only earned about 77 percent of their male counterparts' salary, with black women earning only 68.9 cents for every dollar earned by a white male and Hispanic/Latina women 60.2 cents, says the Institute of Women's Policy Research.

``We have this tendency to celebrate, but I don't know if I'd celebrate that it took that long to get women the right to vote,'' said Paula Xanthopoulou, a former member of the Miami-Dade Commission for Women. ``Women's Equality Day was created to emphasize that women do not have equality.''

Many women's rights groups say the next step in the women's rights movement is securing gender equality to the U.S. Constitution. But the Equal Rights Amendment has been a nationally controversial topic, particularly in Florida.

The ERA was first introduced to Congress in 1923 and was not approved until 1972. The proposed amendment -- which would add 24 words to the Constitution disallowing discrimination based on sex -- then failed to be ratified by its 1982 deadline, coming up three short of the 38-state requirement. Florida was one of the states that didn't ratify it.

The ratification in 1992 of what became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution -- more than 200 years after it was proposed -- gave ERA activists hope that if three more state legislatures were to approve the ERA, the amendment could be ratified 30 years later.

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