Look What We Did Since…
Wednesday marks 106 years since the 19th Amendment was certified by congress into law.
Women could finally vote.
I think about my mother every time this anniversary comes around. She was a little girl watching women march for our right to vote. She knew they were being arrested. She knew they refused to stop. She watched them change history. Those moments lit a fire in her that never went out.
She became the first woman to run the Secretary of the Navy's office in the 1940s. She typed 148 words a minute. Her stenography was so fast no one could calculate it. Judges and lawyers sought her in their courtrooms and offices. She was logical, direct, and still maintained her southern woman grace. She rarely threatened men in their world. She somehow just knew how to play their game her way.
Decades after the suffragettes won the right to vote, my mother was fighting for more rights. In the early 1970s, she helped organize women to get their own bank accounts and credit cards. My mom, who had run an office for the Secretary of the Navy, still needed my father's signature to open a checking account or get a credit card.
I remember walking into the bank with her the day she finally opened her own account. The women in that bank rejoiced. I am so much prouder of her now than I knew to be then.
That was fifty-two years ago.
A Nanosecond in Human History
I've recently realized how short the timeframe is when women have enjoyed our rights. I guess I wanted to gloss over the millennia when women existed with no rights. That span of human history is difficult for me to comprehend.
Then I started thinking about just how old that status quo was.
In the earliest human clans, men hunted and protected the family. Women took care of that same family. That’s the status quo for how our roles were modeled ever since.
In ancient Greece, women were confined to the women's quarters. Men owned public life, law, and war. Yes, women managed the households and slaves, but had no standing of their own.
In feudal Europe, noblewomen ran entire estates, managed income, oversaw everything while men fought war after war. Every legal right still belonged to their fathers, sons, or husbands. Women held entire kingdoms together and owned absolutely nothing.
The Industrial Revolution pushed women into factories as living expenses increased and people couldn’t live on only what a man could earn. Employers paid these women one-third to one-half of what men earned. They justified it by teaching society to see women not as breadwinners, but as cheap, supportive labor.
The assumption that women's labor is worth less than men's didn't start with your last paycheck. It was baked into the economy two centuries ago.
Upper class women weren't much better off. They were relegated to be the "Angel in the House," the moral support for their working husbands. They ran the house and everything about their family’s lives. With no rights.
The belief that men lead and women support them is as old as humanity itself. It has been the status quo for every culture, every family structure, every institution, since humans first walked the earth.
Compared to that timeline, 106 years of women’s rights is like a nanosecond.
What We Built in That Nanosecond
My mother walked into a bank in 1974 and opened her first checking account in her own name. Fifty-two years later, women control ten trillion dollars.
Women control over $10 trillion in U.S. household assets right now. By 2030, that number is expected to hit $30 trillion. We run 14 million businesses that bring in $2.7 trillion in revenue. We make up nearly half of all political donors.
Women have been the single largest voting bloc in America for nearly half a century, with 10 million more registered to vote than men. We have outvoted men by millions every single election cycle. We have literally altered the outcome of presidential elections.
That's not a wish list. That's what we built. Starting from nothing. In the equivalent of a nanosecond in the scheme of humanity.
No wonder there's a backlash by some men. When you challenge thousands of years of programming in a blink of history, the system pushes back hard. The manosphere, the rollbacks, the rage. It's not because we're losing. It's because we are successful, coming so far, so fast.
The status quo cultural norms can't absorb it all.
Cultures don't change quickly. Deep training doesn't dissolve in a century. We're expecting an ancient system to accept in 106 years what it spent millennia building in as the way it was. Of course it's fighting back.
That doesn't mean it's winning.
The Next Nanosecond
Those suffragettes were jailed. Force-fed. Beaten in the streets. It took them 72 years to win us the vote. They didn't stop. My mother didn't stop. The women in that bank in 1974 didn't stop.
We aren't stopping either.
Every right we carry today, women fought and bled to give us. They couldn't see what their fight would build. My mother couldn't see it either, marching for her economic freedom with nothing but conviction and a group of women beside her.
They didn't need to see it. They just needed to show up. Together.
106 years. A nanosecond in human history. We went from owning nothing to controlling trillions.
Imagine what the next nanosecond holds.