DNC Women's History Month Newsletter 2024
 Hello Women's Caucus Members, I hope you had a great week. Please see below to read the Women's History Month edition of the DNC's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion newsletter. In Solidarity, Lottie Shackelford |
 DEI at the DNCNewsletter: March 2024 Issue “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” - Shirley Chisholm
Celebrating Women’s History MonthWomen’s History Month is a time to celebrate the invaluable contributions from all women to our country and to rededicate ourselves to continuing to build on all of the progress we have made. Women's History Week started in 1978 as a local celebration in Santa Rosa, CA, with events centered around International Women’s Day. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring a week in March to be National Women’s History Week. Since 1995, every president, including President Biden, has proclaimed March as Women’s History Month. Women's Suffrage & the 19th Amendment
The 19th Amendment promises that “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.” As seen in this timeline, the push for the 19th Amendment—and subsequent voting rights milestones for women of color–was long and arduous. 72 years went by between the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls and the ratification of the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920. Then, it took over 60 years for all existing and eligible states to ratify the 19th Amendment, with Mississippi being the last to do so, on March 22, 1984.
National suffrage groups were key to the success of the movement. In 1890, two prominent suffrage groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) which lobbied for women’s voting rights on a state-by-state basis. In 1900, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped up to lead NAWSA. Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 by a group of women including Frances E.W. Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns are credited to have choreographed the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, DC. Click here to learn more about the march. There were countless other leaders, especially women of color, who were also on the frontlines dedicating themselves to ensuring women’s right to vote. A few of these pioneers, celebrated within this article, were the community organizer Juno Frankie Pierce and the journalists Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Elizabeth Piper Ensley, who championed both suffrage and civil rights; Native American women such as Susette La Flesche Tibbles and Zitkala-Sa; queer women like the poet Angelina Weld Grimké and the educator Mary Burrill; Latina women like Jovita Idár, who protected her family’s newspaper and the rights of Mexican-Americans; and Asian-American women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who led thousands of marchers in a 1912 suffrage parade in New York. Things to Do in the DMV
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