Yesterday, we raised the 19th amendment flag on the Citizen Flag Pole on Nashua City Hall Plaza and I wrote this to commemorate the occasion.
101 years ago, on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote. As a woman born in the 1960s, I felt that with my generation, women had achieved our full rights in society.
My mother and her peers were severely limited in their fields of study and their career choices. When I reached college, I had the opportunity to study any field I wanted to. I entered the male-dominated field of computer science, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and I have enjoyed a successful decades-long career in the field. I never experienced any limits on my opportunities.
Related: I’m in a Hulu Documentary Fighting for Women’s Sex-Based Rights
That changed in the last few years when the NH legislature passed and the governor signed into law bills that strip women of our rights.
HB1319, “Prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity” was signed into law by Governor Chris Sununu in June 2018. This law makes it illegal to deny men who self-identify as women access to women’s public restrooms, changing rooms, or locker rooms. A man can put on a dress and a wig and walk into the Nashua YMCA and strip naked in front of little girls or sit and watch them undress and anyone who tries to stop him risks being hauled in front of the NH Commission on Human Rights.
In July 2019, Gov Sununu signed bill SB263, “anti-discrimination protection for students in public schools” into law, which allows males who identify as female to access female restrooms and locker rooms in public schools and allows males to compete in female-designated sports. This allows men to compete and dominate in women’s high school sporting competitions with only their say-so that they identify as female.
On August 18, 2020, Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess raised the 19th amendment flag on this flag pole in honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote. Two months later on October 10, we raised the Save Women’s Sports flag on this pole, with permission of the City, where it was supposed to fly for a week and early in the morning on October 11, Mayor Donchess sent two city workers to remove the flag because he was offended by the message “Woman = Adult Human Female” on the flag.
The Mayor believes that the word “woman” should not be exclusively for adult human females. I would love to ask the Mayor “What is a woman?” What could he answer?
As women, we have fought our way up from not having the right to vote one hundred years ago to having full rights to pursue our dreams and now we are on a downward slope to losing our sex-based rights and being under the thumb of men who can take away our spaces and our sports, leaving us to settle for whatever crumbs they leave us.
Speak up for your rights. Don’t let them take them away.
Learn more about the attacks on women’s sex-based rights and how you can fight back at Save Women’s Sports (savewomenssports.com) and Women’s Liberation Front (womensliberationfront.org)
Also available on YouTube.