The 19th Amendment and its legacy: Fights remain for voting inclusivity
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During and after the 2020 election, countless news articles were devoted to the voting impact of women: suburban women, Black women, white women, older women, younger women, college-educated women, high school-educated women and just about every other category in which they could be sliced, diced and otherwise grouped.
And indeed, women did have an outsized effect on the election. Black women helped propel Democrat Joseph R. Biden into the presidency, with about 90% backing the former vice president on his way to reaching an historic high of 81.3 million votes. Majorities of Latina voters and suburban white women with college degrees also backed Biden.
SYRACUSE, NY (WRVO) – When Kamala Harris is sworn in today as the nation’s first female vice president, it’s a milestone that will not go unnoticed in central New York. It’s a day that Sally Roesch Wagner, a women’s suffrage movement historian and founder of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation in Fayetteville, has been waiting for, for a long time. Though, Wagner said it’s been a much longer wait for Gage, who was a 19th century suffragist.
“I think she would say, ‘Finally. What took you this long? In 1884, I was an elector at large in the Equal Rights Party ticket when we had a woman for president and a woman for vice president and the media said we were the campaign that was raising the most issues. It’s taken you this long to get a vice president and you’ve never had a woman president?’” Wagner said. “She hounds me with her anger and frustration, even from the grave.”