03/16/11: A long, ongoing journey

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

WHEN Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she wasn’t the first woman to do so. That honor belonged to Victoria Woodhull, who ran in 1872. Back then, few women even had the right to vote.

When Sharon Chamberlin was announced as the new acting police chief in Norfolk, much was made of her being the first woman in that position. She may have been the first in Norfolk, but the nation’s first female police chief was Penny Harrington, who was appointed in 1985 in Portland, Ore.

Women have contributed much to our society, in both conventional and nonconventional ways. In an effort to recognize those contributions, March has been designated as Women’s History Month.

The acknowledgement of women goes back much further than the first presidential decree in 1987. In the U.S., its roots can be traced to March 1909, when working women and women’s rights advocates came together to lead an uprising of garment industry workers in New York City. March 8 was first declared International Women’s Day in 1911. The United Nations began sponsoring the day in 1975.

Over the years, the day became less about working women and more about the achievements of individual women, and in 1980, the day became a week.

After Congress designated March 2-8, 1980, as National Women’s History Week, President Jimmy Carter noted that “men and women have worked together to build this nation.”

Referring by name to Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Tubman and Alice Paul, Carter urged “libraries, schools and community organizations to focus their observances on the leaders who struggled for equality,” a nod to the strength of the feminist movement. He also urged ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Thirty-five states ratified the ERA, three short of the number necessary. But ratification is still possible. An attempt is under way to obtain approval in three more states. Just last month, the Virginia Senate passed a resolution (SJ 357) to ratify the amendment. The House version of the resolution (HJ 640) never made it out of committee, and the Senate bill was sent to the same graveyard. Virginia remains one of 15 states that never ratified the ERA.

Thomas Jefferson may have written that “all men are created equal,” but he didn’t mean women, saying that “[w]ere our state a pure democracy, there would still be excluded from our deliberations … women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issues, should not mix promiscuously in the gatherings of men.”

Despite Jefferson’s attitudes, women have made great strides in becoming full participants in our society.

Frustrated by the curriculum offered to most women, which focused on domestic chores, Mary Lyons founded the first American institute of higher education for women, Mount Holyoke College, in 1837. Virginia resident Diane Crump rode in the Kentucky Derby in 1970, the first woman to do so. And Sally Ride became the first female to travel in space in 1983.

That so much of women’s history is more recent than we’d like — the passage, for example, of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act just took place in 2009 — is indicative of how far we have to go. But it is also a measure of how far we’ve come.