Women's Equality Day Is This Year's Most Ironic Holiday

In case you needed a reason to celebrate on this last Monday of August that wasn’t Miley Cyrus making your most embarrassing moment look like Beyonce’s Super Bowl halftime performance, today is National Women’s Equality Day. Yay! Yay for being human just like a man!

Women’s Equality Day owes its existence to New York Rep. Bella Abzug, who in 1971 requested that every August 26 commemorate the ratification of the 19th Amendment by encouraging Americans to celebrate the fact that women are also people and to recognize that while people, women are often treated like sub-people.

It doesn’t take a 2013 Bella Abzug to point out that while we’ve come a long way, baby, we’ve got a long way to go. Especially since a certain contingent of what Tina Fey brilliantly christened “grey faced m[e]n,” who have decided that the best way to “fix the economy” is to “crawl all up inside women’s bodies like creepy legislative parasites.” There’s also the lingering issues of equal pay, maternity leave, affordable childcare, social attitudes about women’s bodies and who has a right to access them and when, and general social fuckery around how women are depicted in media.

But celebrating something called “Women’s Equality Day” seems to have an especially ironic flavor this year, as the Supreme Court’s ruling on voting rights has prompted a disheartening tide of voting regulations that smell an awful like they were specifically designed to disenfranchise people of color. Here’s another irony pang: the 26th of August 2013 just so happens to fall right around the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Women have had the right to vote since 1919, but now many women of color’s rights are under attack. In many ways, women’s equal access to “humanity” status has backslid since 1971.