Women struggled to get voices heard
Female pioneers like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped pave the political path for others

By Alyssa Guiliani, Staff Writer

This year’s presidential campaign might not have been open to Hillary Clinton if indomitable female pioneers had not paved a political path for today’s women.

More than 150 years ago, there were many courageous women who were willing to take a stand for their beliefs and fight for their civil liberties.

Others, like Barbara Jordan, left an indelible mark on Texas’ and the nation’s political landscape in the last half of the 20th Century.

All of these women were strong believers in equal rights, and all are celebrated on college campuses and in cities across America each March during Women’s History Month.

Susan B. Anthony became one of the first historical icons for women. Early in her life, Anthony dedicated herself to women’s suffrage, abolition of slavery, and equal educational opportunities. Anthony was vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for equal rights throughout the second half of the 19th Century and into the early 20th Century.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned beside Anthony and endured jeers and laughter from members of Congress and fellow citizens as they fought vainly for the right to vote.

In 1866, Stanton became the first woman to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, even though women remained ineligible to vote. Stanton was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, helped found the American Equal Rights Association, and was an activist in the anti-slavery movement that preceded the Civil War.

With their political involvement gaining momentum, more brave women began to step forward and run for public office.

The first woman to run for president of the United States was Victoria C. Woodhull. She waged an unsuccessful campaign in 1872 as the candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Woodhull also published her own newspaper and was the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street, as well as a dedicated women’s rights activist for decades.

After years of struggle and defeat, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified in 1920. Anthony and many of her early supporters had been dead for more than a decade. But women now held the right to vote in America.

Still, women continued to struggle to have their voices heard.

“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free,” Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the United States Congress, said in 1968. She ran for president in 1972, but fared no better than Stanton a century earlier.

In Texas, Houston native Barbara Jordan became a powerful voice for equality in the second half of the 20th Century.

Elected to the Texas Senate in 1966, Jordan was the first African American to serve in that chamber since Reconstruction. In 1976, she became the fi rst African American woman from the South to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

According to the University of Texas’ Web site, Jordan fought tirelessly for civil rights and sponsored legislation to expand the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to cover Mexican Americans living in Texas and other southwestern states.

Her eloquence highlighted several important national events, according to the Austin institution, where she later taught ethics and public affairs.

“My faith in the Constitution is whole. It is complete. It is total,” Jordan told the House Judiciary Committee during the 1974 impeachment hearings directed at President Richard Nixon, who later resigned in disgrace. “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

She never ceased to remind college students of the importance of the nation’s supreme law and the never-ending need to defend the civil rights it protects.

“What the people want is simple,” Jordan told a fresh batch of Harvard University graduates in 1977.

“They want an America as good as its promise.”

Now, Hillary Clinton, the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from New York and the only former First Lady ever elected to public office, is campaigning to become the first woman nominated by a major party for president.

This 2008 presidential race is already a historic milestone, but the Democratic National Convention will decide in August in Denver, Colo., whether America will find its first woman on the presidential ballot this November.