The Story of Women: It’s Come a Long Way

In The Star’s 128 years, its headlines have em blazoned women’s activities across its pages in many roles – as suffragettes, Civil War nurses, soldiers and spies, World War I Liberty Bond sellers, flappers, world war II riveters and bomber ferry pilots, West Point cadets and Navy admirals, ERAers, Right-to-Lifers, trend-setting first ladies, and Cabinet members. And now in the year of the paper’s demise, the first woman Supreme Court justice has been nominated. The story of women’s contributions to the Republic in the last century and a quarter is as much a part of its warp and woof as the exploits of its Molly Pitchers, Abigail Adamses and Dolley Madisons of an earlier era .. Peggy Eaton didn’t jump mto the Tidal Basin as our contemporary Fanne Foxe, whose midnight plunge toppled a tippling congressman, but she cut~ swath through Andrew Jacksons Cabinet circle that rocked Washington with whispers of scandal. And Abscam had nothmg on Rose O’Neal Greenhow, whose Confederate spy network, Just across the park from the White House, stretched across the Atlantic to England and the Continent. Liberation is not a new concept. The first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 was a forerunner of the Ms. era and the nationwide 1970s movement to pass the ERA amendment. Nor is the idea of a woman for president new. Belva Ann Lockwood tried it back in 1884. She was the first woman nominated for the office and actually got a few votes. In the years ahead, maybe another woman will