Women’s [In]equality Day
I worked as a Public Defender, and I want to tell you about a hallway. Every courthouse in Oklahoma has one. It is the hallway outside the courtroom where protective orders get heard. You learn to recognize the women who are sitting in it. They arrive early and sit facing the door. Often, they have a folder containing photographs, printed text messages, and a police report. You can sometimes hear them rehearsing what they are going to say to a judge they have never met about the worst thing that has ever happened to them.
More than once, I watched a woman sit in that hallway and decide it was not worth it. She will gather her folder, walk out, and go home. Often back to the person who pushed her to the courtroom in the first place.
I think about that hallway and those women sometimes. I think about them every time somebody tells me that the fight for women's equality in this country is finished. That statement is so far from the truth.
What August Should Mean
On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified. The 19th Amendment says: “[t]he 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.” It was the single largest expansion of democracy in our history, recognizing the right to vote for roughly 26 million American women in a single stroke. Eight days later, on August 26th, we mark Women's Equality Day. It is a day worth celebrating, indeed.
Here is the part that gets left out of the celebration. The 19th Amendment was first introduced in 1878. It took 42 years of ridicule, dismissal, and outright rejection to pass. 42 years, while two generations of women were told to be patient, to be reasonable, to wait their turn. Even then, it did not deliver. Women of color were left behind for decades by poll taxes, literacy tests, and the ordinary cruelty of local officials who simply refused to let them cast their ballot.
Thus, the story of the 19th Amendment is not a story about a country that fixed something. It is a story about a country that had to be forced, slowly and at great cost, to keep a promise she had already made on paper. The story of the 19th Amendment carries simple lessons we must not forget: progress is possible, progress is never automatic, and progress can be reversed.
What It Looks Like in Oklahoma
I do not need statistics to know that in the United States, we still have yet to realize the promise of the 19th Amendment. You deserve the numbers, so here they are. Oklahoma ranks second in the nation for women killed by men. We have ranked in the top 10 nearly every year since 1996. We average 114 domestic homicide victims a year, and 2023 was the deadliest year on record. Of the Oklahomans killed by an intimate partner, 82% are women, and every adult woman among them was killed by a man.
More than half of the women in this state, 51.5%, will experience physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in her lifetime. Half. That is your mother, your sister, your daughter, your wife, or you.
That is not a coastal problem or a partisan problem. That is our state, the Great State of Oklahoma. A state that leads the nation in killing women has no business calling itself pro-family, nor pro-life.
What Is Being Taken Right Now
While Oklahoma women live with those numbers, Washington has spent this year dismantling the protections built to solve them.
Executive Order 11246, which protected workers on federal contracts from sex and race discrimination for 60 years, has been rescinded. The Women's Bureau, established in 1920, faces elimination. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs ("OFCCP"), which recovered $260 million for workers who were discriminated against over the last decade, has seen its staff cut by 90%. Enforcement of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is in doubt, which puts at risk the 2.8 million pregnant workers who need something as basic as a bathroom break or an hour off to see a doctor.
Title X family planning dollars have been withheld from more than 800 clinics serving roughly 850,000 patients, most of them for cancer screenings and contraception. Black women are already three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women, and the response has been to cut the hotline and the agencies that track why. All of this is true while the pay gap continues to widen. Women earn about 80 cents for every dollar earned by white men, worse for Latina, Black, and Native women. At the pace we are moving, my granddaughters will not see equal pay in their working lives.
None of these statistics is an accident. Each of these is a choice somebody made, meaning we have the chance to make new choices and set new policy priorities in this country.
They Are Coming for the Vote Itself
While we can debate the best way to ensure that our mothers, wives, and daughters are treated equally in the workforce, we should all rally around their right to vote. And yet, we are witnessing, in real time, an attempt to disenfranchise millions of American women of their right to vote. They have the gall to call it the “SAVE America Act.”
The SAVE Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. That sounds reasonable until you understand the mechanics by which that will happen. Roughly 85% of women change their names when they marry, which means an estimated 69 million American women hold legal names that do not match their birth certificates. Under this law, those women could be turned away at registration unless they produce a marriage license or a divorce decree.
My wife, Rocio, spent years becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States. I watched what it took. I watched what the paperwork does to a person. I will not stand quietly while this Congress makes American women prove their identity with a filing cabinet in order to exercise a right the Constitution already guarantees them. We spent 40 years winning the right to vote in the 19th Amendment. I am not going to watch as it is repealed by administrative burden. I am a champion for the right to vote, and will fight to protect it for all Americans.
Why This Man Cares
I am going to be honest with you, because it matters here. Yes, I am a man. I will never know what it is to walk to my car with my keys between my fingers, or to be talked over in a meeting, or to sit in that hallway with a folder full of photographs. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to speak for women who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.
I am one of nine children raised by a mother who worked harder than anyone I have ever known. I am the husband of a woman who built a life in a country that did not make it easy, and I am raising five sons.
Five boys. No daughters. Every single day, I am shaping and molding the men they will become. I hope that I am able to teach them chivalry in a world of hyper-individualism and that I can teach them to respect women as equals in a world that seeks to disenfranchise them.
That is my stake in this. It is not charity, and it is not politics. It is the plain fact that my boys will inherit whatever we leave them, and I refuse to leave them this. I will teach them to help me build a better world with me, if that is what it takes.
What I Am Asking
Women's Equality Day is not a celebration of a job well done. It is a receipt. It is the proof that ordinary people, told for four decades to be patient, refused.
So here is what I am asking of you. Register to vote. In fact, check your registration today and again in October, because the rules keep changing. Then talk to the women in your life about whether their name on the rolls matches the name on their documents, because 69 million women could find out the hard way. Vote on November 3. Up and down the ballot. Bring someone with you to the polls. The women who won the 19th Amendment did not have money, power, or a single friendly institution in Washington. They had each other, and they had 40 years of refusing to go home.
We can do a lot with 10 weeks. Who will you take with you to the polls on November 3rd?
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Oklahoma ranks second in the nation for women killed by men. Domestic Violence Homicides in Oklahoma Among Nation's Highest, OKLA. ATT'Y GEN. (Feb. 2024), https://oklahoma.gov/oag/news/newsroom/2024/february/domestic-violence-homicides-in-oklahoma-among-nation-s-highest--.html.Oklahoma has ranked among the top 10 states for women murdered by men in single-victim/single-offender incidents since 1996, and averages 114 domestic homicide victims annually. Gentner Drummond, Breaking the Silence: Oklahoma's Fight Against Domestic Violence, OKLA. ATT'Y GEN. (Oct. 2024), https://oklahoma.gov/oag/news/generally-speaking/2024/october-breaking-the-silence-oklahomas-fight-against-domestic-violence.html.Oklahoma recorded more domestic violence homicides in 2023 than in any prior year on record; women comprised 82% of intimate partner homicide victims; an average of 59 children annually witness family violence-related homicide. Domestic Violence Homicides Spike in Oklahoma, Fatality Review Board Releases Annual Recommendations, OKLA. ATT'Y GEN. (Feb. 20, 2025), https://oklahoma.gov/oag/news/newsroom/2025/february/domestic-violence-homicides-spike-in-oklahoma-fatality-review-board-releases-annual-recommendations.html; see also OKLA. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FATALITY REVIEW BD., ANNUAL REPORT (2024).National rankings derive from the Violence Policy Center's annual study. VIOLENCE POL'Y CTR., WHEN MEN MURDER WOMEN: AN ANALYSIS OF 2023 HOMICIDE DATA (2025).U.S. CONST. Amend. XIX (ratified Aug. 18, 1920).
