The On The Battlefield Of Equality - 1625 Words

On the Battlefield of Equality As Marilyn Monroe once said, A wise girl knows her limits. A smart girl knows she has none. The nineteen-twenties in America was a time filled with cultural, social, and political boom. This decade, later called the roaring twenties laid the foundation of many concepts and ideas still in use in America today, including automobiles, literature, music, and patriotism. Women in the 1920s overcame the battle of obtaining suffrage and the advancement of birth control; these challenges led to an embracing of new ideas in fashion, sexuality, and equality. To begin, suffrage for women in America began in the mid 1800s and ended in 1920, when women in America were finally granted with this well-deserved right†¦show more content†¦Anthony) which, if passed, would grant universal adult female suffrage (Streissguth 37). After years of the Amendment passing through the House, and then being defeated in the Senate, it finally passed in the year 1919 (Streissguth 37). The Amendment then passed state ratification, and on August 26, 1920, the secretary of state a the time, Bainbridge Colby, signed the edict stating that universal suffrage was the law of the land (Streissguth 38). This fight for women s suffrage was a long and hard one for the American women, as it was difficult to progress the movement due to the ongoing racism in America in the twenties, making colored and white women unable to lobby and protest together (Dumenil 24). Regardless of the struggles faced by women in the movement, they ultimately reached their goal of suf frage and equal rights once and for all. Continuing on, women in the Roaring Twenties also faced the problem of being uninformed on birth control. Margaret Sanger, a nurse who was moved by the despair caused by the unwanted pregnancies and children she witnessed daily, almost single-handedly began the birth control movement in the early 1900s (Streissguth 38). Sanger, eager to learn more and do something to help this cause, traveled abroad to Europe to visit birth control clinics there, bringing back knowledge and new ideas with her (Takeuchi-Demirci