19th Amendment
Floor Speech
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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, 150 years ago, in Washington State, a suffragette named Mary Olney Brown went to vote, and like so many others at the time, her vote was rejected. Why? Because she was a woman. She said: ``The idea of a woman voting was regarded as an absurdity.''
Fifty years later, thanks to the tireless efforts of women like Mary Olney Brown, that longstanding injustice finally began to change when this Chamber passed the 19th Amendment to guarantee women's right to vote.
Today, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of that important milestone in the march for equality, it is inspiring to see how far women have come over the last century. When we passed the 19th Amendment, there was only one woman in Congress--Jeannette Rankin. Before I ran for the Senate in 1992, there were two women Senators. I was very proud to join the Senate in 1993 and to join with Senator Barbara Mikulski, who is here today, and we became six women in the Senate. Today, there are 25 women serving in the Senate and 102 in the House of Representatives. Today, women are Governors, Fortune 500 CEOs, Nobel Prize-winning researchers, and candidates for President.
It is clear we have come a long way, but we still have more work to do. Women may have more representation, but we still make up less than a quarter of Congress. Women of color are still particularly underrepresented. And we still have some ceilings left to crack. Women are still paid less than men for the same work, and the same gap is even wider for women of color. Women still bear most of the burden of being a working parent, especially when so many lack access to affordable childcare and paid family leave. Nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade was decided, women are still fighting to defend their right to make their own decisions about their own bodies.
These injustices even extend to voting rights. Even after the 19th Amendment was ratified, many women of color were still denied the right to vote by discriminatory barriers designed to keep them from the ballot box. Today, there are still far too many States that have put into effect voter-suppression efforts that disproportionately hurt communities of color, like harsh voter ID laws, limits on early voting, polling machines, voting locations, and ``exact match'' requirements that make it easy to purge someone from the voter rolls due to a typo.
After all the years women spent fighting for their right to vote, it is unacceptable that these kinds of efforts would strip that right away from anyone, which is why we need to pass legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full power to protect the rights of voters across our country.
While there is still a lot of work ahead to make good on the promise of the 19th Amendment and make sure that everyone in our country who is entitled to vote is actually able to vote and that every woman is able to exercise all of her rights under our Constitution, I am confident we can get there, and I want to say why.
After 2016, I watched as women across the country stood up, spoke out, and fought back. I saw as much energy as I have seen in my lifetime as women joined together against countless different efforts to roll back the clock on their rights. I saw millions of women turn out to march for their rights, and then I saw millions of women turn out to exercise those rights last November. And what happened? They broke records and barriers across the country, and afterwards, several States started breaking down some of the barriers that were put up to block people from voting. I believe that momentum is going to continue to build, especially as women continue to reach out to other women to build a bigger and more inclusive coalition.
So today, as we celebrate the Senate vote to pass the 19th Amendment, I want to not only remember how hard women fought to get that right to vote but to promise that we are going to keep fighting just as hard to protect it for everyone in this country, and then we are going to keep using it to fight hard for the change we want to see in our communities.
Thank you.
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