100 Years After Winning Right to Vote, Women Are a Force in Politics
“I think its important To celebrate what’s happening now…but it’s also important not to forget that these moments have happened before,” says Emma Green of The Atlantic.
This week marks the 100th anniversary of white women securing the right to vote in this country, and while it’s a rightfully celebrated milestone, the reality is that the right to vote was not granted to Black women or any Black Americans until 1965.
But now, when the centennial of women’s suffrage falls in the same week as the Democratic National Convention, where we are seeing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) accept the vice presidential nomination, it seems worth pausing to take stock of the role of women in this country in 2020 — both politically and socially. Detroit Today host Stephen Henderson examines this moment in time for women with someone who has been thinking a lot about the subject.
Listen: The Atlantic’s Emma Green discusses the 100th anniversary of women securing the right to vote, women in the 2020 election and the state of the Feminist movement in modern America
Guest:
Emma Green is a staff writer with The Atlantic. On the topic of women’s roles and responsibilities amid the pandemic, Green says, “it’s just the way that the pandemic fell out that…the industries and parts of life that women just happen to take an outsized role in are really under pressure.”
She also notes in her recent piece that multiple reports and data indicate that women have generally taken on more child care and household duties than their male counterparts since the pandemic began. On top of that, more women than men have also lost their jobs because of nationwide shutdowns.
As far as the role of women in politics following the 2016 election, Green says, “women are taking this anger this pressure that they feel and turning it into action.”
In looking at Sen. Harris as the vice president on the Democratic ticket, Green notes that “Harris is self-consciously fashioning her candidacy as not only an achievement for women but also the women who have often been left out of feminist stories…she’s expanding the vision of what it means to be a woman on the ticket.”
