Celebrated annually on August 26 in the United States, Women's Equality Day commemorates the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. The 19th Amendment prohibits the federal government and states from denying the right to vote to U.S. citizens on the basis of sex. It was first celebrated in 1971. Congress designated the observance in 1973. Traditionally, the President of the United States issues a proclamation for the observance every year starting with President Richard Nixon in 1973. 

Here are some websites where you can learn more: 

If you are interested in doing further research on this topic you can try the following databases, which you can find on the library website under "Electronic Resources:"

  • Gale Virtual Reference Center. A collection of e-book reference works. 
  • Hein Online. For legal and government documents research. 

From our shelves, here are some books that may be of interest: 

 

Cover ArtGendered Citizenship by Rebecca DeWolf
Call Number: e-book
ISBN: 9781496228291
Publication Date: 2021-10-01
By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this study grapples not only with the battle over women's constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen. Through an examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize citizenship to correspond with women's changing status after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Finally, Rebecca DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment, but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.  
 
Cover ArtAmerican Women's Suffrage: Voices from the Long Struggle for the Vote 1776-1965 (LOA #332) by Susan Ware (Editor)
Call Number: 324.623 A512 2020
ISBN: 9781598536645
Publication Date: 2020-07-07
For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognisable figures in the campaign for women s suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal.
 
Cover ArtSuffrage At 100 by Stacie Taranto (Editor); Leandra Zarnow (Editor)
Call Number: 320.082 S946 2020
ISBN: 9781421438689
Publication Date: 2020-08-04
Suffrage at 100 looks at women's engagement in US electoral politics and government over the one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In the 2018 midterm elections, 102 women were elected to the House and 14 to the Senate--a record for both bodies. And yet nearly a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the notion of congressional gender parity by 2020--a stated goal of the National Women's Political Caucus at the time of its founding in 1971--remains a distant ideal. In Suffrage at 100, Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow bring together twenty-two scholars to take stock of women's engagement in electoral politics over the past one hundred years. This is the first wide-ranging collection to historically examine women's full political engagement in and beyond electoral office since they gained a constitutional right to vote. The book explores why women's access to, and influence on, political power remains frustratingly uneven, particularly for women of color and queer women. Examining how women have acted collectively and individually, both within and outside of electoral and governmental channels, the book moves from the front lines of community organizing to the highest glass ceiling. Essays touch on * labor and civil rights * education * environmentalism * enfranchisement and voter suppression * conservatism vs. liberalism * indigeneity and transnationalism * LGBTQ and personal politics * Pan-Asian, Chicana, and black feminisms * commemoration and public history * and much more. Contributors: Melissa Estes Blair, Eileen Boris, Marisela R. Chávez, Claire Delahaye, Nicole Eaton, Liette Gidlow, Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq), Emily Suzanne Johnson, Dean J. Kotlowski, Monica L. Mercado, Johanna Neuman, Kathleen Banks Nutter, Katherine Parkin, Ellen G. Rafshoon, Bianca Rowlett, Sarah B. Rowley, Ana Stevenson, Barbara Winslow, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Nancy Beck Young.
 
Cover ArtVanguard by Martha S. Jones
Call Number: 323.3409 J781v 2021
ISBN: 9781541600256
Publication Date: 2021-12-07
"An elegant and expansive history" (New York Times) of African American women's pursuit of political power--and how it transformed America      In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women's political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women--Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more--who were the vanguard of women's rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.       Now revised to discuss the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vital contributions of Black women in the 2020 elections, Vanguard is essential reading for anyone who cares about the past and future of American democracy.