Pelosi Marks Women’s Equality Day: “They Said Women Would Have to Wait. Women Did Not Wait.”
San Francisco – Today, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi joined San Francisco women leaders, workers, small-business owners and disability advocates at San Francisco City Hall to commemorate Women’s Equality Day and the 106th anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment.
The event featured Kim Tavaglione, Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council; Lauren Crabbe, Owner and Founder of Andytown Coffee Roasters; Kelly Dearman, Executive Director of the San Francisco Department of Disability and Aging Services; and Sascha Bittner, Commissioner on the San Francisco Disability and Aging Services Commission.
Speakers celebrated the generations of women who fought to secure and expand the right to vote while sounding the alarm over renewed Republican efforts to restrict access to the ballot. The SAVE America Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, threatening to disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans—including nearly 70 million married women whose current names do not match their birth certificates.
The event also highlighted the Trump Administration’s assault on mail voting and attempt to seize federal control over elections, including an executive order directing federal agencies to create centralized voter lists and subject state and local election officials to new federal mandates.
View photos from today's event here.
Read Speaker Emerita Pelosi's remarks as delivered below:
Speaker Emerita Pelosi.
They said women would have to wait. Women did not wait.
We worked, we demonstrated, we had hunger strikes. There were quite a few that were rejected from their families. They had courage to make a difference. Part of that was tied into the abolitionist movement. Fredrick Douglas was a great suffragist as well as an abolitionist. For many of the women who were working all that time came from that community as well....
So when it happened over 100 years ago, it was cause for great jubilation. I visited Tennessee on a number of occasions to see what they had done to commemorate the fact that Tennessee was the last state to ratify that amendment to the Constitution.
So again, it's a happy day for all that they did. But everything we do is about the future. And the future is impaired by what the White House is trying to do now, with the "Save Act."
Just for an example, because we can talk more about it if you have questions about it, but I'll give you the provisions here. My name, first born Nancy D'Alesandro, a long time ago in Baltimore, Maryland, thousands of miles away. This bill says that's in in my house today. Now just think of women having to go back and get their birth certificate so they can go over a name that they haven't used for decades.
This especially affects older women, some younger than me. But my kids—half of them use their own name, Pelosi, but half of them use their married names. But for you to marry him, you may not be able to vote. Is that a problem? When they think this up?
I'm a long way into this. I won't start over. I will use my mother of five voice in the mean time. So what we have to do right now is protect what the suffragists did and also what it meant to our country, because the right to vote is about policy.
I'm so glad that the women who are here today are making their own mark. They are able to do that because of policy that helps women succeed, whether it's in the workplace, in the neighborhood, and all the rest. So we cannot allow this so-called "Save Act."
They can't win on the policy. They cannot win on the policy. Even denying that affordability is an issue, that the cost of living is up.
So this is a fight that we are engaged in and of course, this morning you may have seen—I don't have all the particulars here but all the Democratic committees have spoken out against what the Supreme Court did the other day.
I'll just say this about affordability. I have a daughter that raised three teenage boys. She told me her grocery bill now for just her and her husband is more than it was when she was feeding three very hungry children.
So affordability, Mr. President, is an issue. So don't bring that up with us. So anyway, as a salute to the women who made this happen, women in the African American community very much a part of it, not as recognized as I think they—as many of us agree, they were not recognized enough, but we are changing that. As well as just all the people who made it possible.
We can talk more about—I get enthusiastic about it, we can talk more about it as we go along. But again, I'm particularly happy because the first woman Speaker of the House gavel was part of the 250th anniversary of the unfolding of increasing democracy in our country.
With that, I'd like to introduce Kim Tavaglione, whom I've learned so much from. She's the Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council and she has been an advocate for women in the workforce and women in society in so many ways. I'm honored to have her with us this morning.
Thank you.