A Brief History
On September 21, 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was confirmed by the Senate as the first ever female Justice of the Supreme Court. What other indications do we have that American women are really on an equal basis with men?
Digging Deeper
We list a few of these facts that can be considered signs of equal rights progress:
Women’s Suffrage, 1920;
The Equal Pay Act of 1963;
a married woman was first allowed to get a credit card in her own name, 1974;
the first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, 1981;
the first American woman astronaut in space, Sally Ride, 1983;
the first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, 2007;
the first major party female presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, 2016;
the first female Vice President, Kamala Harris, 2021;
and the first “First Lady of the US” with a PhD, Dr. Jill Biden, 2021.
Tell us other signs you believe showing women are or are becoming equal in the comments below.
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you believe American women have achieved equality with men? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Rowland, Debran. The Boundaries of Her Body: The Troubling History of Women’s Rights in America. Sphinx Publishing. 2007.
Suk, Julie. We the Women: The Unstoppable Mothers of the Equal Rights Amendment. Skyhorse. 2022.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of O’Connor being sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger as her husband John O’Connor looks on, was taken from Flickr‘s The Commons. The uploading organization may have various reasons for determining that no known copyright restrictions exist, such as:
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