Trail-blazing women look ahead 100 years

In an unthinkable 2020, we mark the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which in theory granted American women the right to vote (though in practice, left many women of color locked out of the vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act over four decades later).

As we mark this complicated and seismic occasion for American women, we are living in a moment that would have seemed unfathomable for many of us even just months ago: a pandemic, a fraught election campaign, calls for racial and social justice that continue unabated. While there has certainly been progress in the path toward gender equity since the 19th Amendment was ratified—including the fact that?more women than ever in history are running for Congress in 2020?and Kamala Harris just became the first Black and South Asian female?vice presidential candidate of a major political party—there is still much work to be done.?

There is still a persistent wage gap disparity, and women remain vastly underrepresented in all levels and sectors of leadership here in the US and around the world. At the start of this year, only?15 of the 193 United Nations countries were led by women, and that has now dropped to 13. Women currently make up only?23.7% of the US Congress?and only?5.8 % of Fortune 500 CEOs—and these numbers fall even lower when it comes to women of color. There are also concerns about how the pandemic is disproportionately impacting women and other marginalized groups, whether in the ways they are suffering more financially or the failings in our caregiving systems that are forcing many women to drop out of the workforce to take care of their children, slowing or even reversing whatever progress has been made.??

From the vantage point of this turbulent moment, and as we look back at 1920, it seems equally crucial to consider the?next?hundred years and ask where the road to true equity should take us next. Is there a “women’s movement” in 2020? What does the turbulence of 2020 teach us about what 1920 left undone?

The fact is, with all the problems we face, we need women’s voices, visions and values more than ever, and we all benefit when our institutions and industries are as diverse and reflective of the communities they aim to serve. Read on for galvanizing words from prominent female leaders who offer valuable insight, inspiration and powerful calls to action.

Marianne Schnall is the author of “What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power” and the founder of?Feminist.com?and What Will It Take?Movements.

Early suffragists saw the vote as key to all women’s personal as well as political autonomy–and blamed the unfettered physical and sexual abuse men wielded against women on male lawmakers, jurors and judges. Winning the right to vote for women was their antidote to sexual assault in the home, on the streets and in workplaces. Unfortunately, in their passionate pursuit of gender equality through the vote, few white activists considered how Native, brown and Black women’s oppression under colonialism, immigration law and slavery figured into the solutions suffragists sought.?

Gender equality movements are stronger and more diverse today, and we struggle to eliminate blindspots that have weakened our claim to universal personal and political autonomy. And the abuses borne by diverse individuals of all genders because of their gender continue at shocking rates.?

We can’t wait another 100 years. We must recognize gender violence as the national crisis that it is and use the franchise to ensure both our political and personal equality. That means that our vote must be deployed to enact laws, elect representatives and elicit public will to, in the words of abolitionist and feminist crusader Sarah Grimké, get our “brethren to take their feet from off our necks” both literally and figuratively.

Anita F. Hill?is a professor at Brandeis University and the chair of the?Hollywood Commission for Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality.

The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment – a moment that is largely celebrated as the movement victory that allowed women to vote.?

Except it didn’t.?

It reads “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Which meant the same tactics that had been executed against Black, brown, Asian and indigenous men were going to carry over to apply to those women.?

As we watch our current president pardon Susan B. Anthony almost 150 years after she was arrested – while the legislation to fully restore the Voting Rights Act sits on the desk of the administration he oversees – a stark picture appears of the reality of how far and ultimately how little the country has progressed.?

In so many ways, the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is the perfect example of where we have failed in our work. When a certain group, in this case white women, are willing to sell the rights of others for their own, the foundation is compromised. The progress becomes inherently flawed, gaining power at the expense of other people is simply reenacting the same injustices on each other.?

The truth of our country has been laid bare in 2020. If we want to fight for true progress, we have to go back and study the minds that led women’s suffrage to the consciousness of white America more than 100 years ago.

We need to study?the work?of Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin and the many Black, brown and indigenous women who?worked alongside them?only to watch the movement woefully leave them behind. We, as White women, have to allow ourselves to be led by the next wave of women and gender expansive thinkers and fight for a future that is built upon a foundation strong enough to last. Something that we can all celebrate in 100 years.?

Megan Rapinoe?is co-captain of the US Women’s National Soccer Team, with whom she won two World Cup championships.

Picture a little girl born on Women’s Equality Day, 2120. One hundred years from now, women’s equality might still be a day on the calendar, but, unless things change, it won’t be a reality. Last year, the World Economic Forum projected that if the pace of progress remains constant, it will take?another 208 years?to reach gender equality in the United States. That means you won’t see it, I won’t see it and even a little girl born a century from today won’t see it in her lifetime either.

Of course, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in 2020, it’s that the pace of progress is anything but static. At this time last year, how many of us had ever heard the terms “social distancing” or “flattening the curve”? How many times have you already heard them?today?

That’s what pandemics do. They force us to change in uncomfortable ways at speeds we never thought possible. But by making us do things differently, they also present us the chance to do things better.

What does that mean for gender equality? If we’re serious about thanking essential workers—the majority of whom are women, the majority of whom are women of color—let’s stop undervaluing women’s work and remove the structural barriers that keep so many women in low-wage jobs.?

If we really have new appreciation for the unpaid caregiving work women are doing at home every day, let’s make sure lawmakers and business leaders are passing new policies like paid family and medical leave to make caregiving easier and more evenly distributed. If we now have a deeper understanding of the importance of effective government, let’s start opening new pathways to ensure that women are running for office in equal numbers.?

Yes, the pandemic is exposing deeply entrenched inequalities, but what we do in response is up to us. We can accept another two centuries of incremental gains, or we can celebrate Women’s Equality Day by insisting on something much better much sooner.?

Melinda Gates?is co-chair of the?Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?and founder of?Pivotal Ventures.

The good news for the women’s movement is that our idea of what it means to be a woman has become more open-hearted and inclusive, and many people like me (a woman of transgender history) now get to live our lives openly, with pride and dignity and joy.

The bad news is that women continue to be under attack, both from new adversaries as well as older, more traditional ones, who hate the idea that men might have to share their power or have to grant women autonomy over their own bodies and lives. Part of the pushback against the dignity of transgender women’s lives, in fact, is just the same old misogyny taking on a new form.?

But there’s no turning back now. When I think of the women’s movement, and the fight for LGBTQ equality in particular, I think of that Paul Simon song: “I believe in the future we will struggle no more; maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours, I feel sure.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan?is the author of 15 books, including the novel “Long Black Veil” and the memoirs “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders” and “Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.” She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University and is a member of the Board of Trustees of PEN America and formerly chaired GLAAD’s board of directors.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I could say in a 200 - 400 word piece that might have any impact or purpose when it comes to the question of what feminism will look like by 2120. What I’d?like?to see in terms of female empowerment across the globe and what will eventually evolve is impossible to tell at this juncture.?

I’ve been passionate about global feminism ever since I had the opportunity to fully appreciate the full scale as to how “disempowerment” affects the lives of millions of women and girls across the world.

Just to offer some context, at this point in time, globally,?one in three women?are impacted by sexual or physical assault in their lifetime, while the Covid-19 lockdown situation has created a horrific spike in domestic violence against women.?Two?thirds?of the world’s 774 million illiterate adults are women, according to the United Nations. This situation has not changed much over the last 20 years.?In Central and West Africa, 28 million girls are not in school and will never step inside a classroom. Across the world, 39,000 girls under the age of 19?become child brides every day. Worldwide?according to?the World Health Organization, 800 women die every day due to pregnancy or childbirth related complications–99% of these live in developing countries. Women currently make up?only 24%?of the world’s?parliamentary?seats.

I’m just citing a few facts, but the list of injustices and equities against women goes so much further. As a woman of 65,?I feel encouraged and discouraged by some things that have taken place. Encouraged by the #Me Too and #TimesUp movements but discouraged that the moment of focus came and went far too quickly, when there’s still so much work to be done in every corner of the world.

There has been a great deal of “talk” going on for decades, but the real challenge is to create lasting systemic transformation–with urgency and pace. So it’s essential that the global movement for women’s rights continues to galvanize and energize. It must discover a strengthened will to take action to create lasting positive change.?

Right now our planet is going through an extreme (manmade) crisis at so many levels. Quite honestly, I feel that the crucial question is whether human beings will actually even be here in one hundred years’ time.?

Annie Lennox?OBE?is a singer/songwriter and founder of?The Circle, an organization championing the rights of women and girls around the globe.

Feminism has empowered so many women, now we must use that power to end inequality by closing the wealth gap via universal basic income strategies, living wages and affordable housing.?

To achieve those goals, we should spend the next 100 years focusing on creating better social systems that make sure that everyone’s needs are being met without attaching a social stigma to poverty. We should focus on protecting the right to vote, to be educated, to access medical care of all kinds, and to be safe whether you are in your home, the workplace or at school. We should be teaching respect for cultural and racial differences in our media, our schools, and in our homes.?

Making a better future for us all means combating hate and bigotry, whether it comes in the form of xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, racism, ableism or classism. We should stop paying lip service to the ideals of justice and start doing the very real work of abolishing the systems that abuse and disenfranchise so many people.?

Devoting funding to violence intervention, anti-poverty and other measures proven to improve communities by ensuring the health of the people in them is work that we can and should do right now, as well as for the next century.

Mikki Kendall?is the author of “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot.”

The most important goal for America is to create a truly equal playing field. The barriers, both explicit and implicit, to equal opportunity for women must be eradicated. The answer, of course, is not artificial quotas, but equal access to positions, jobs and other benefits within our society. With true equal opportunity will come equal performance and achievement.?

Such adjustments will not come easily because they are achieved at the expense of favorable terms for certain groups, which groups will necessarily lose such prized positions and favorable treatment. Sucess in this regard should be reflected in the composition of corporate boards and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. The private sector, while aspiring to provide opportunities for women, seems to suffer more significantly from the lack of women’s participation in the long term leadership development timeline which corporate executives undergo.

Diversity in elective and appointed office (legislative, executive and judicial) is, oddly enough, achieved more readily as social consciousness grows. There are less experienced-based barriers in such public offices. However, large corporations, even while seeking diversity in high management selections will be hampered unless steps are taken while women are in middle management to generate the experience and other prerequisites necessary for high level management.

This is why the most telling test and the most difficult to achieve goal is women’s leadership in high level, large scale business and industry. This is also why it takes the longest time to achieve this goal. But with commitment from all sides, this goal can be achieved in our children’s lifetime and this will have a transformational impact on American society and maintain America’s leadership as the land of opportunity.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen?is a former Republican US representative from Florida and the first Latina elected to Congress.

The work ahead for us in the next century is repairing our souls. The measure of equality must start with enough clean water, food and care for every person on this planet.

I think if we’ve learned anything from the year 2020, it is how profoundly vulnerable we are. In every way, being under the influence of a deadly pandemic, the resurgence of hate, and the vision of everyday brutality has forced us to stop and ask some specific questions about the future, especially for women. We may be celebrating 100 years of the 19th?Amendment giving some (White) women the right to vote, but we know that voting—even for a century—was not enough to deliver equality for girls and women.

Women are the impoverished of our country, our children are hungry (1 in 4 children in America?can’t be sure?they will have a next meal)—and this scandal exists while businesses enjoy their lush profits, many at the expense of poorly, unequally paid employees. Some would call the women of America the cheap labor that fuels our economy.

The work to make women equal in our society has already absorbed billions of dollars over many years by untold numbers of well-meaning advocates. So far, nothing has worked sufficiently to be able to celebrate the status of all women. We do have individual success stories we can point to—but in the next century we need to think less of personal excellence and more of lifting all women up from the sub-standard existence we have.?

I think true equality for women will not happen until we’ve “fixed” our Constitution to add the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s a simple statement that says one can’t be discriminated against because of one’s sex. That’s it. And yet we are approaching a century of work to get this idea into the Constitution as the 28th?Amendment.

These days we talk a lot about systemic racism, systemic sexism. There is nothing more systemic than our Constitution. It spells out, in fact, the system: who has rights and protections—and who does not.

My hope is that in 2021 we will finally adopt the ERA and spend the next 100 years creating the democracy we now think we have—one that includes girls and women.

Carol Jenkins?is co-president and CEO of?The ERA Coalition?and?Fund for Women’s Equality.

In 2020, there is a new women’s movement that’s propelling women to new places. It looks like women running for political office, women stepping forward to organize marches, and coordinating calls to actions. In 1920, we didn’t have women in positions of political prominence at the state, local, or federal levels, and women were organizing around convincing powerful men to extend fundamental civil rights.

Today, we are in those positions, but not in equal numbers or representation. Women continue to fight for issues important to us, like the women’s economic agenda, paid family and sick leave, equal pay, affordable childcare, women’s retirement security, raising the minimum way, and more. But this year’s turbulence has shown us that we still have a long way to go.?

Covid-19 is disproportionately impacting women. Women are more likely to be front line and essential workers. Women are engaged in advocacy, not just with social issues, but economic issues that are essentially important for the financial security for women and their families. So there is more work left to be done.

When I think about what was left undone in the 1920s, I reflect on the racial?inequities?that left Black women and women of color out of the movement. Black women still continue to struggle to be included in this movement and recognized as they should. Just last week, we recognized Black women’s equal pay day, which comes months later than women’s equal payday.?

By 2120, we must insist on parity for women in political structures. That means electing women across each branch of government, electing women presidents in both political parties, diverse women leading in each state and community, and eliminating the glass ceiling on women’s leadership in the United States. These steps are absolutely essential to gender equality. When the U.S. finally realizes the promise of full and equal representation, this movement will have a rippling effect across the world.

Lauren Underwood?serves Illinois’ 14th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives. She is the first woman, the first person of color, and the first millennial to represent her community in Congress. She is also the youngest African American woman to serve in the United States House of Representatives.?

If the so-called “racial reckoning” of the past several months has told us anything, it’s that Black women are not celebrating 100 years of the vote. In truth, before the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black people across the South and elsewhere were effectively disenfranchised. And with the latest gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, Black people’s right to vote is quite visibly under attack. The movement for suffrage for Black women has always been ongoing.?

This truth should lead us toward an intersectional understanding of the problem unfolding across the country. Without an intersectional frame, we might miss the fact that white women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony literally whitewashed the movement, both ignoring the obstacles that specifically impeded Black women’s voting rights and erasing Black and Native women from the history of feminist thought and organizing in the US. Without an intersectional frame on Black history and women’s history, we might not see that much of the women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century pitted White women’s demands against Black men’s.?

Black women have sacrificed, bled and died to become enfranchised members of this Republic, and we have fought alongside our white sisters and Black brothers in the overlapping fight for women’s suffrage and Black political power. Yet the rewards for our devotion to an ideal have been disappointing.??

In the next 100 years, we’ll need to build a feminist movement that takes into account the intersectional vulnerabilities of those caught in the grasp of racism, sexism and other forms of domination. We’ll need to take up the call of women like Fannie Lou Hamer and women who carry her torch forward like?Ayanna Pressley, Kim Foxx and Barbara Lee. And more than anything, we’ll need to treat the intersecting injustices of sexism and racism not as dealt-with atrocities of the past, but as constitutive parts of an unjust moment.

Kimberlé Crenshaw?is co-founder and executive director of the?African American Policy Forum. She is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, the host of?Intersectionality Matters?podcast and?founder of the #SayHerName campaign.

Every day, we face the fact that we are a global community. Covid-19 has taught us that lesson. We are a global community for trade and income, but ordinary people, whose countries produce wealth for others, are left behind in poverty, especially women and children.

Women won the right to vote 100 years ago. For our species to survive 100 years from today, we must adopt feminist values of cooperation, caring and sharing. As long as the dominant values in our world are profits, unbridled wealth, and domination and power, wars and poverty will not cease.?

At this point in our human development, all countries should be cooperating to share knowledge, the resources of our planet so that no child is hungry or homeless; education including science, racial, gender and environmental justice should be mandated as a tool to erase ignorance, hatred and intolerance. Ethnicity should be celebrated, not denigrated. And yes, women need to be in decision making positions as equals, not tokens.

We can attain that dream. We have the knowhow. We just have to change some political realities: Gender balance needs to be mandated. Current gender education should teach that women are equal and not are not to be seen as sex objects. Public campaign financing needs to be enacted so women can be elected.?

Early childhood education should be provided for all children so women can take their place in civic life starting now. Coretta Scott King said, “We will never have peace in the world until women take power.” ?Si Se Puede! We can make this happen, now!

Dolores Huerta?is a labor leader and community organizer, co-founder of?United Farm Workers?and President of the?Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Over the last century, cities have grown continuously; today, more than half the world’s population lives in cities and the next century promises to be an urban one. Despite the fact that women the world over have always been drawn to cities as places of work, culture, diversity, and freedom, gender equity has rarely been at the center of urban planning.??

Cities have been designed and run by and for men and have failed to live up to their potential as places of gender equality. How can we ensure that the city of 2120 is a city for everyone??

The future city must care about care work. In most of our cities, the work of keeping each other fed, clean, healthy, and happy is either performed free by women in the private space of the home or done for poverty wages in the public sphere by women, youth, immigrants, and racial minority workers.??

The city’s “so what?” attitude to care work is evidenced by everything from the lack of affordable child care to the lack of public toilets. A care-full city must fairly redistribute care work and pay it what it’s worth; if the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that we’ve undervalued this labor for far too long.

The future city must rethink the home. The American dream of the single family home is in many ways a nightmare. Expensive, inefficient, isolating, and in fact the number one site of violence against women, it’s done little to support gender equity.??

What if we built affordable, accessible living spaces that accommodated a wide variety of families, including those don’t fit the outdated nuclear model? We could share care work more widely and reduce the isolation that allows domestic violence to thrive.?

The future city must defund the police. How are we going to pay for living wages, affordable housing, and child care? As Black Lives Matter activists and abolitionists have long argued, the billions of dollars we’ve pumped into policing and prisons to “solve” social problems like poverty, addiction, and lack of education could be redirected to services that would actually make a difference in people’s lives, especially women’s lives. A city for everyone is possible; we have the means to make it happen, if we find the will.???

Leslie Kern?is an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women’s and gender studies at Mount Allison University and the author of “Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World.”?

As much as we expect and plan for things to change over the next 100 years, one basic premise that will definitely be around is that money equals power. In order to improve and reach gender equality over the next century, women need to understand the importance and impact of money.?

It all starts with how we are socialized. Women are not taught to ask for what we want and need. It is one of the reasons we have been held back for the last 100 years. We have the right intentions and we have strong goals for the future, but we need to better understand how we can make our goals a reality.?

Women have not been taught to follow the money. We need to fix that and fix it now. With money comes power. With money comes choices and mobilization. With money comes freedom and equality.

When you help an individual, you help the world. Most people think that when a woman does something, she only does it for women. In reality, she does it for everyone. Often, people say to me, “Thanks for helping women’s tennis.” It drives me crazy. They would never say that to a man. They would say, “Thanks for helping tennis.” This thinking keeps our marketplace half as big.

If we change that perception, we change the world. We will have a Congress with more women that looks genuinely like America. We will have our first female president. We will have more women and people of color in leadership positions. We will have equality. And once we have equality, we?all win.

Billie Jean King?is the founder of the?Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative.

In the 100 years since the 19th Amendment was ratified, so much has changed for women – and yet there is still so far to go.?

Consider one key measure: women as political leaders. In a truly equal world, women would run half of all countries.?Instead, they run just 12 out of 195. Women should hold half of all elected seats in legislatures worldwide. Instead, they comprise a quarter of parliaments. In the United States, more women than ever now serve in the Congress, but they’re still just 26 out of 100 senators and just 23% of US representatives. And of course, the United States has never elected a woman president or vice president – although that might change this fall.

After a century of women’s suffrage in America, women aren’t even close to parity in government. We must make progress faster.?

The good news is that more women than ever are running for office in the US. Six women ran for president this cycle. In 2018, more women ran for Congress than ever before – and now, two years later, another record-breaking number of women are on the ballot nationwide. Plus, the current Congress is the most racially and ethnically diverse in history, including the first Native American women and the first Muslim women ever elected to Congress. This is powerful evidence that women across diverse backgrounds want to lead – and voters want them to lead.??

We should do everything we can to keep this trend going. That includes supporting women candidates up and down the ballot, getting out the vote for them, supporting their campaigns financially if we’re able, elevating so-called women’s issues like childcare and paid leave, and encouraging talented women in our communities to run for office. Most importantly, it means showing up on Election Day and voting – and not just in presidential elections, but in state and local elections too.?

Many suffragists hoped that the 19th Amendment would usher in a new era of women’s political power – and it did. But that has not yet led to women holding equal power in government. In an equal world, women – 50% of the population – would hold 50 percent of elected seats.?

I hope we reach that benchmark long before 2120.?

Sheryl Sandberg?is COO of Facebook and co-founder of?LeanIn.Org.?

In order to realize gender equity – in America and around the world during the next century, we must eliminate the racial disparities that plague our societies. At the heart of gender discrimination, racial discrimination and discrimination of all other forms are rigged rules that leave some of us out and leave some of us behind.??

For too long in America, “gender discrimination” has been defined as the disparities that exist between women and men. What that erases is the disparities between and among genders that are often the consequence of racism. From wages, to healthcare, to housing and climate, women of color fare far worse than their counterparts.?

Black cisgender women make 62 cents to every dollar that white cisgender men make, and to the 79 cents that White women make,?according to?the National Partnership for Women & Families. 34% of Black transgender women report making less than $10,000 per year?according to?a joint report from the National LGBTQ Task Force, the National Black Justice Coalition and the National Center for Transgender Equality.?Eight months into this year, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality, there have been?more murders of Black transpeople, than there were in all of 2019.?

To combat this, we must eradicate racial discrimination from all of the systems that organize our lives, and from the rules that guide our lives. Eliminating racial disparities will necessitate a rebuilding and a remaking of the infrastructure needed in our communities for everyone to live a good life, and it will ensure that neither gender nor race nor any other contrived category stands as a barrier between a human being and their right to live with dignity.

Alicia Garza?is principal of?Black Futures Lab?and co-creator of?#BlackLivesMatter. She is?strategy and partnerships director for the?National Domestic Workers Alliance?and co-founder of?SuperMajority, a women’s equality organization made up of women from all backgrounds, races and ages.

While 2020 marks a significant milestone with the centennial celebration of women’s suffrage, the fight for gender equality is far from over.?

Those of us fighting for equal representation have joined a centuries-long movement, and our responsibility now must be to elect more women at every level of government, despite the barriers that remain. For example, campaign funding remains unequal for women candidates. These and other disparities must be addressed if women candidates are going to be able to mount successful campaigns. Equal representation isn’t about electing one female representative, governor, or president - every woman candidate counts. But I surely hope that by 2120 we have elected a woman president.

Part of the cultural aspect to this challenge is that America has yet to figure out how to respond to women who are assertive and ambitious. All too often, powerful, successful women are ignored or attacked for the very traits that make them excellent leaders. We can’t legislate a change in how female candidates are viewed, but change is needed. Our society needs to react when we hear this type of sexism and communicate how inappropriate it is.

Similarly, we must also move past racial bias to bring more minorities to the decision-making table. To achieve equal representation, our country’s leadership must reflect the experience of all Americans, not just those who have traditionally been in the “room where it happens.”

The benefits of diversity in leadership are clear. When women are fully engaged, whether at the corporate board table or the policy-making table, results improve. Even this year, we’ve seen that countries with women in positions of power did markedly better at handling COVID-19.?Diversity of experience, a drive for collaboration, and results-oriented leadership are skills our country desperately needs, and they are skills that women leaders in particular bring to the table. It’s long past time for our country to be led by representatives who reflect the diversity of our nation. May the centennial celebration of the 19th?amendment renew our commitment to making it so.??

Christine Todd Whitman?was the 50th governor of New Jersey and its first woman governor. She is a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and president of the Whitman Strategy Group.

We live in interesting and challenging times. Not only is the world experiencing unprecedented disease with Covid-19, but the planet itself is shuddering with climate change, and our assumptions about economic and social relationships are all in flux. In the midst of all this, Joe Biden has given us a ray of sunshine and of hope. He selected Senator Kamala Harris to be his running mate in the Presidential election of 2020.?

She follows in a long line of Black women demanding to be heard. This year, 2020, marks the 100th?anniversary of the ratification of the 19th?Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave the right to vote to women. In spite of the glorious words of our founding charters, women had to wait until August 18, 1920 to be able to participate in our democracy as citizens.??

Even before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was made law, theoretically opening the ballot box to all Americans, black women challenged the barriers to their participation by running for office. In 1928,?Minnie Buckingham Harper?became the first Black woman state legislator. She had been appointed to the post. The first black woman to run for and get elected to a state legislature was?Crystal Bird Fauset, in 1938, who served for two years in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. A decade later, in 1952,?Cora Mae Brown?was elected to the Michigan State Senate. Also in 1952,?Charlotta Bass?was a Vice Presidential candidate on a third party ticket, the Progressive Party. Not until 1962 was a second black woman elected to a State Senate seat,?Verda Freeman Welcome. Then in 1966,?Yvonne Braithwaithe Burke?was elected to the California State Assembly. Two years later, in 1968, Shirley Chisholm from New York was elected to the US House of Representatives.??

In 1972, Chisholm broke ground again, running for President of the United States. By then, she had been joined in the Congress by Yvonne Burke and Barbara Jordan of Texas (and would be?joined by Cardiss Collins of Illinois in 1973).?Running in Illinois, I?won election?to the United States Senate in 1992, the first Black woman in the history of this country to do so.??

Now, in 2020 there are?22 Black women?in the US House of Representatives. Senator Harris in the Senate (who along with Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Tim Scott constitute the entirety of the Senate’s black caucus).?There are?six Black women in statewide executive offices, 72 State Senators, and 232 State Representatives. Senator Harris is breaking new ground, and should she and Joe Biden be elected, will be the highest-ranking?Black woman in the history of the United States.???

A century ago, Anna Julia Cooper, a Black woman suffragist and abolitionist,?coined the phrase,?“When and where I enter, in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”

Senator Harris carries with her the hopes and aspirations of multiple constituencies. Black women, black people, Indian people, an entire community of immigrants, White people who want to end the systemic racism that has characterized American politics from the beginning–people who want to see the American dream realized will see their aspirations carried by her. It will be daunting, but she shows every indication of being up for it and ready for the job.?Her election will be the dawn of a new century for women.???

Carol Moseley Braun?served as Democratic US senator for Illinois from 1993 to 1999, the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand from 1999 to 2001 and was the first African American woman to be elected to the US Senate. In 2003, she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.?

Women are not a monolith. We are multiracial. We are US-born and immigrants. We are cisgender and transgender, and we span the ability and sexuality spectrum. In order to realize the promise of suffrage, the people holding political power should reflect our richness and complexity – the full strength and power – of the women of this country. Women of color, in particular, have been relied upon to be consistent voters but never adequately supported to vote, run for office, or lead our political system.??

In 2120, we will hopefully remember 2020 as the year the nation awakened to the depth and breadth of change that’s needed, and supported women of color to lead that change.?We have seen things that we can’t unsee: the critical role women – especially women of color – play in our economy and society through essential jobs in the care economy and beyond. The racial violence that and injustice that plagues Black communities, the gaping holes in our safety net, and more.?

We have seen the human cost of a President who refuses to govern in a crisis, and instead traffics in misogyny and racism and attacks core American institutions of democracy. Frankly, we have seen too much. And we will never unsee it.?

In order for us to have a healthy democracy, we need so much more than the 19th Amendment, ratified 100 years ago. We must invest in women of color voters, in women of color leadership pipelines, and especially working-class women of color who have been invisible in our democracy and taken for granted in our economy.?

We need to invest in the capacity and power of women of color to lead in the solutions to the enormous challenges of our time. And we need to see the breakthroughs, like the first Black and Asian American vice presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket, breakthroughs because they are more the exception than the rule, become the new normal.

We have a lot of work to do, but women always show up when there’s work to be done.

Ai-jen Poo?is executive director of the?National Domestic Workers Alliance?and co-director for?Caring Across Generations?and a co-founder of?Supermajority.

One hundred years ago, after decades of struggle and sacrifice led by women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, the 19th Amendment was ratified. It was an enormous milestone in the fight for women’s suffrage, but women of color were left out.?

It was the tireless work of women like Amelia Boynton Robinson and Diane Nash, which continued through the 1960s and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,?that led to suffrage for all women. Those women knew that a more perfect union meant a more just, more inclusive one.?

This year, we’ve come one step closer to realizing that vision. Kamala Harris has already made history as the first woman of color on a presidential ticket, and by winning in November she will forever change the face of power in this country. I look forward to working with her to build a future that works for all women.

Our country is facing a pandemic, an economic crisis, a reckoning on racism and a high-stakes election. We have a lot of rebuilding ahead of us. That rebuilding cannot simply be a return to a “normal” that wasn’t working for so many people – especially women and people of color.?

First, we must recognize the value of women’s work with equal pay. This pandemic has highlighted the essential roles women play in our economy. Yet, on average, women earn 82 cents on the dollar, while Black and Latina women earn even less. That must change.?

Addressing workplace equity also means creating a more family-friendly workplace culture with a universal paid leave program and affordable, accessible child care. That will not only help working parents and businesses, it will also help us prepare for future health crises.?

We’ve made progress when it comes to having more women and more women of color in leadership. Over the next 100 years we should see women in the Oval Office, and more women leading our corporations, our legislative bodies and our courts. We must keep working toward the day where women make up 51% of Congress, hold half of the governorships in the country, and half of the seats on the judicial bench. I hope we get there far before 2120.?

Kirsten Gillibrand?is a Democratic US senator from New York, a former candidate for the Democratic nomination for president and the creator of?Off the Sidelines, a movement to encourage more women and girls to run for office and participate in civic life.

What a thrill to celebrate with women everywhere the Centennial of the 19th Amendment! After all, women fighting for and achieving suffrage led to many other advancements for women’s equality. At one time, women could be arrested if found?on the steps?of the Harvard library. Today, women have equal status in colleges and universities.?

Once educated, women’s status advanced economically due to their equal ranking in the medical, educational, business, corporate, scientific, and political professions. Motherhood is increasingly seen as a respected profession, with parenting equally shared. We can now celebrate so much more equality!??

Ten years ago, I began to hear Gloria Steinem declare publicly and repeatedly to the world; “Our society needs to be linked, not ranked.” Once again, Gloria is ahead of most of us. In addition to being equal, we also need to be connected to each other. Women care about our relationships, our interconnectedness. We must make this a priority.

Look at nature–it’s filled with differences. Each aspect of nature provides its own function and uniqueness. It all works together, interconnecting in just the way it should. This is how humanity should be. All races, genders, and ethnicities of equal value and linked together.?

As we continue to work on greater equality, let’s also imagine our interconnectivity. After all, we are a global family, and we need one another. We need to care for our capacity to be linked together, as nature intended for us to be. Imagine us all creating a future in which we are linked together toward achieving greater world peace.

Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD,?is the founder or co-founder of several organizations including?Women Moving Millions.?She is the author of several books, including Faith and Feminism and And the Spirit Moved Them: The Lost Radical History of America’s First Feminists. She also developed, with husband Harville Hendrix, the?Imago Relationship Therapy, as well as Safe Conversations, a cutting-edge relational education process.?

In 2120, voting while Latina had better be a whole lot easier than it is today, where we have to jump through hoops to cast our ballot depending on our zip code. Latinas still earn half of what men do in 2020, forcing us to work twice as long to make ends meet. It’s therefore no surprise that making long waiting times a feature of our current election process is equivalent to a poll tax.?

Why do such disparities still exist? For the same reasons it took until 1975 for “language minority” Latinas’?voting rights to be protected: because making sure Latinas can vote requires candidates to fight for it. Progress of enfranchising Latinas has been slow.?

My hope is that we can finally address systemic inequities so that by 2120 my grandchildren’s children are able to present themselves unapologetically and be able to attain America’s promise on their own merits. That they can be fully enfranchised, living in a just equitable society.

María Teresa Kumar?is CEO and president of?Voto Latino.

The women’s movement in 2020 is unlike any other movement in our history. People from all backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders and sexualities are being represented and leading this fight for change.??

This year, women have come together to resist President Donald Trump’s attacks on reproductive freedoms and attempts to degrade women with misogynistic insults. It has been incredible to work with strong and resilient women in Congress and in my district who are making positive change through organizing, voting, and passing meaningful legislation.???

With that being said, the women’s movement in 2020 is a continuation of the work started by suffragists like Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and other Black women and women of color who fought not only for the right to vote, but also fought against sexism and racism. They led the way for future generations of women to lead and demand a seat at the table.?

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, it’s more important than ever to remember how far we’ve come. My mentor, Shirley Chisholm, was the first Black woman elected to Congress. Today, we have a record number of 131 women serving in Congress, including 24 African American women. While we should celebrate this milestone, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to ensure equality and respect for women in politics.?

The turbulence of 2020 has shown us that “intersectionality,” coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is more important than ever. In order to achieve equality in the next decade, we must continue fighting for policies that have historically been classified as “women’s issues” but are in fact everyone’s issues. Things like protecting reproductive health care, making child care more accessible, closing the wage gap, and securing paid family leave. Rest assured, women of color continue to lead the movement and get things done.

Barbara Lee, a Democratic representative from California, worked on Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign in 1972.

In 1920, after nearly one hundred years of struggle, protests, imprisonment and life and death advocacy, the 19th Amendment was added to the US Constitution, giving some women in the US the right to vote.??

In 1965, after more than 300 years of struggle, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, new guarantees were put into place for ALL women and all citizens to exercise their rights as citizens of a representative democracy to vote in their local, state and national government elections.

In 2020, in pivotal elections in the US, women are expected to vote in record numbers, but with new barriers about how they can cast votes—in person during a pandemic, risking their health or by mail-in ballot, risking not being delivered in time to be counted. These and other concerns about voter intimidation and suppression are leading to a new threat to women’s votes, particularly women voters from Black and brown communities, that their right to vote may be discounted, suppressed, misreported or not counted at all.?

Projecting what is needed in the next 100 years to eliminate all barriers to all citizens being able to cast a vote and have the assurance that their vote counts and is counted, is total and true equality in this country. Equality of opportunity for every voter to have access and information to be an informed voter and to have an election process that makes it equally possible for every voter to be able to vote. Equality of representation in the governing bodies that make the decisions about who votes, who counts, and who wins.

That is the struggle for true equality that must continue to be the keystone for all the other milestones along the way. And if all the efforts to implement policies and programs that ensure equality across the board, in 2120, the American President will be able to claim as fact that she was elected by a majority of the citizens of a country that will finally truly be a democracy FOR the people, with government elected by ALL of the people.?

Pat Mitchell?is a media executive, author and the editorial director of?TEDWomen. She was the first female president of PBS.??

As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, it is so important to reflect on the work it took to get to this moment, but also acknowledge how far we have to go to reach full equality in the US.?

In the next 100 years, our women’s movement has the opportunity to heed the lessons of the suffrage movement - and what 1920 left undone - by remembering that the fates of ALL women – White, Black, Asian, Latinx, indigenous, LGBTQ – are intertwined, that if you are suffering, then I am suffering. And, that when we work together and lift each other up, we are so much more powerful than when we stand alone.

To truly realize gender equity by 2120, we need to support women in their dual roles as breadwinners and caregivers, with a particular focus on women of color, who face such large income and wealth disparities.?

As Covid-19 has exposed, women have been deemed both essential and expendable for far too long, and the only solution is to redesign our systems and economic structures to better support working families. We need policies like paid family leave and equal pay. We need increased access to affordable childcare and flex time. We need equal partners at home to carry their fair share of household responsibilities. And, we need a cultural revolution that sees caregiving as more than “women’s” work, but an economic necessity, where we value women for their full contributions to society and support women in leadership.?

Jennifer Siebel Newsom?is first partner of California. She is a filmmaker and founder and chief visionary officer of?The Representation Project.?