Votes for Women!

Today marks the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage in the U.S., and the end of a decades-long battle to recognize the wisdom of granting voting rights to our population's fairer half.

On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, after generations of women and sympathetic men fought what at times seemed to be a losing battle against prevailing wisdom of the time.

And it's appropriate today to think back at how hard-fought the suffrage battle was – about the committed women and men who dedicated their lives to a cause that seems so simple to us today.

Women including Iowa's own Carrie Chapman Catt, a Charles City native, League of Women Voters founder and one-time president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Catt was one of the founding mothers of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (now the International Alliance of Women) and served as the group's president from 1904 until 1923. She was such a die-hard suffragist, she wrote it into her prenuptial agreement with husband George W. Catt – the document guaranteed her two months in the spring and two in the fall to work to advance women's right to vote.

Suffrage opponents' arguments tended to focus on women's separate-but-equal status; her power, as one writer put it, "in her normal and mighty mission as Mother and molder of childhood's character and the inspirer of manhood's ideals".

“In politics, there is struggle, strife, contention, bitterness, heart-burning, excitement, agitation, everything which is adverse to the true character of woman,” Elihu Root argued in an address to the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894. “Woman in strife become hard, harsh, unlovable, repulsive; as far removed from that gentle creature to whom we all owe allegiance and to whom we confess submission as the heaven is removed from the earth.”

But as a hard, harsh and unlovable 21st Century woman, I've got to say: Thanks for the pedestal, but I prefer the vote -- and the strife, the struggle the heart-burning and excitement that come along with being a full citizen of these United States.

It's happily strange to think it once was common knowledge that a person's reproductive organs could make them unsuited for public life. Of course, the 19th Amendment didn't do away with all "common sense" arguments for injustice and inequality -- not by a long shot.

Suffrage wasn't the first step forward in this country's journey toward equality, and Lord knows it wasn't the last. But it was a heckuva leap forward – one that didn't come without toil – and this 90th anniversary is a good time to stop and think about something Catt said herself:

“To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.”