Santa Clara County Celebrates Suffrage Virtually on August 26

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to inflict damage on our health and economy, and now with the addition of smoke choking our air as much of California burns, this would not appear to be the best time for a celebration. However, some events are too important to just let pass, even in times such as these. The 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote is certainly one of those.

We need to take this anniversary as an opportunity to celebrate the work of the women leaders and role models in that original group of suffragists, especially women of color such as Ida B. Wells and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. We also need to recognize the leaders and role models doing work since 1920 in our own communities and families for equality, and empowerment, and economic security.

Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Mississippi and would lose both of her parents to yellow fever. However, she became a prominent journalist, suffragist, anti-lynching crusader, co-owner of a newspaper, co-founder of the NAACP, and the most famous African-American woman of her day. “With no sacredness of the ballot there can be no sacredness of human life itself,” she said.

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee emigrated to the U.S. as a child. She graduated from Columbia University and became the first Chinese woman in the U.S. to receive a doctorate in economics. She began her activism for the right to vote while still a student, helping lead a 1912 New York City march for suffrage on horseback. “For no nation can ever make real and lasting progress in civilization unless its women are following close to its men if not actually abreast with them,” she said.

The struggle for women’s rights did not end in 1920, and in my lifetime, I have been so blessed to grow up in Northern California where there have been so many women as role models.

Foremost among them is Dolores Huerta. I feel so fortunate to have gotten to know her during my career. She is best known for co-founding the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and others, and their work on behalf of migrant farm workers and Latinos, but from the very beginning she highlighted the rights and achievements of women. “We as women should shine light on our accomplishments and should not feel egotistical when we do. It’s a way to let the world know that we as women can accomplish great things,” she said.

In the early 1980s, the national media began referring to Santa Clara County as the “feminist capital of the nation” after Janet Gray Hayes became the first female big city mayor in the U.S. in 1975 and then in the next decade both the San Jose City Council and Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors had female majorities. Hayes, Susan Hammer, Zoe Lofgren, Blanca Alvarado, Gerry Steinberg, and so many others from that era became role models for me and a whole generation of women.

My most important role model of female leadership was my first, my mother Carmen Chavez, who taught me to never stop learning, and that public service is all of our responsibility.

The work of these women, and so many others, is why we must have a celebration this week.

While the fires and pandemic are preventing in-person celebration, we can be just as powerful online.

On August 26 at 11 a.m. we can gather virtually, wearing white as the original suffragists did, and each holding up a picture of a woman we want to honor. We will hear from some amazing local leaders about the women in their lives who have been role models.

We cannot let this centennial anniversary pass quietly.

You can register for the August 26 event at https://tinyurl.com/SCC-WRTV-Press-Conference-Reg.