Last updated: June 10, 2026

On August 26, 1970, women in the United States held a nationwide Women’s Strike for Equality to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees women the right to vote and to advocate for passage of the Equal Right’s Amendment. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). It was estimaged that as many as 50,000 women had participated in the protest in New York City, and others gathered across the country. The following year, Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York, introduced a resolution to designate August 26 as Women’s Equality Day. On August 16, 1973, Congress approved H.J. Resolution 52, which stated that August 26 would be designated as Women’s Equality Day and that “the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation in commemoration of that day in 1920 on which the women in America were first guaranteed the right to vote.”

The Women’s Suffrage Movement that resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment stretched from the first Women’s Convention that was held at Seneca Falls NY in 1848 to the final ratification of the amendment in 1920.  Image 1 shows Pennsylvania Governor William Sproul ratifying the amendment to guarantee suffrage for all women who are citizens of the United States. This effort took a whole 72 years of protests and marches and letter writing and picketing and cajoling and rallies across the country in the brutal state-by-state ratification process to finally give women the right to vote.  That is a kind of persistence that I think is crazy/amazing and for which I am so grateful!!

Happy Women’s Equality Day everyone!

UPDATE: This blog post was updated on June 10, 2026 to include links in reference section below for the image sources, to include some additional information, and to make minor editorial changes.

Reference: Women’s Equality Day, Wikipedia.

Image 1: GOV. SPROUL OF PENNSYLVANIA SIGNING SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT, Library of Congress, LOC Control Number 2016870446, 1919.

Image 2: Women’s Equality Day graphic, posted on Pinterest.