Women Belong Everywhere: Behind the Design for Women’s Equality

Every year on August 26, we recognize Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the certification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It’s an important date in American history, and one worth celebrating. After generations of organizing, protesting, petitioning, marching, and refusing to accept that political participation belonged only to men, women finally gained constitutional protection against being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex.

History is rarely as tidy as the paragraph we learned in school.

The 19th Amendment was an enormous victory, but it didn't mean every woman walked into a polling place the next morning with equal access to the ballot. Black women continued to face poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence, and other discriminatory barriers, particularly in the South. Native American women faced questions of citizenship and voting eligibility. Asian American women were affected by discriminatory citizenship laws. The right existed on paper long before every woman could exercise it equally in practice.

I think that context matters, especially on a day devoted to equality. Celebrating progress shouldn't require us to pretend the work was finished when a law was signed or an amendment was ratified. If anything, understanding how incomplete some of those victories were makes the women who kept pushing afterward even more remarkable.

And women have been pushing for a very long time.

So many things that feel completely ordinary today were once considered inappropriate, unrealistic, or downright radical for women. Higher education. Owning property independently. Entering certain professions. Serving on juries. Running for public office. Having a bank account or credit in your own name. Even the idea that women should have a meaningful voice in the government making decisions about their lives had to be fought for generation after generation.

That's something I think about whenever someone suggests equality has already been achieved and we can move on now. We've certainly come a long way, but equality isn't a finish line we crossed somewhere in the twentieth century. It's something each generation inherits and has to decide whether it's willing to protect, expand, or quietly allow to erode.

We're still having conversations about women's representation in government and leadership. We're still talking about pay and economic opportunity. We're still debating access to reproductive healthcare and who should ultimately make decisions about a woman's body. We're still watching women walk into spaces where they're the first, or one of very few, and then celebrating milestones that remind us those doors haven't actually been open for very long.

That's part of why voting feels so inseparable from Women's Equality Day to me.

The ballot isn't the entirety of equality, but it gives us a voice in nearly everything that shapes it. We vote for the people who write laws, appoint judges, fund schools, determine healthcare policy, and make decisions affecting families, workplaces, and communities. Women fought for the ballot because they understood that being governed without having a meaningful voice in government would always leave their rights vulnerable to decisions made by someone else.

More than a century after the 19th Amendment, I don't want to forget how extraordinary that very ordinary act of voting once was.

I also don't want to pretend women are one giant voting bloc who should all think alike. We don't. Women disagree about politics, religion, family, work, healthcare, and probably just about everything else. Equality doesn't mean agreement. It means having the same freedom to form those opinions, express them, build the lives we choose, and participate in the decisions that affect us.

That's where Women Belong Everywhere comes in.

When I created this design, I wasn't thinking about one particular profession or one particular kind of woman. I was thinking about all the places women were once told they didn't belong and how ordinary it now feels to see us there.

Women belong in voting booths and boardrooms. In classrooms and courtrooms. In laboratories, workshops, hospitals, statehouses, small businesses, military uniforms, construction sites, and corner offices. Women belong at kitchen tables raising families if that's the life they choose, and they belong behind podiums making decisions that affect millions of people if that's the life they choose instead.

There isn't one correct way to be a woman, and there shouldn't be a predetermined list of places we're allowed to occupy.

Maybe that's why Women Belong Everywhere feels especially appropriate for Women's Equality Day. The words aren't complicated. They're not particularly revolutionary, either, or at least they shouldn't be.

They're a reminder of how far we've come, how many women had to push against the boundaries drawn around them to get us here, and how dangerous it would be to assume those gains can never move backward.

Women's Equality Day can be a celebration. I think it should be. There is an incredible amount of history worth celebrating.

But it can also be a reminder.

The women who came before us didn't fight for a smaller place in the world. They fought for the freedom to decide for themselves what their place would be.

That's the story behind Women Belong Everywhere.

Not that every woman should want the same thing.

Just that wherever she chooses to go, being a woman shouldn't be the reason she's told she doesn't belong.