Dear Progressive Reader,

This week marks the anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. The new law was finally ratified by three-quarters of the states on August 18, 1920, and officially certified by the U.S. Secretary of State on August 26, 1920. The following November 2 of that year, more than eight million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time. Native Americans did not gain full voting rights in all states until 1962, and African American women (and men) were not guaranteed full access to the ballot until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The right to vote remains under threat in this country, due to restrictions and impediments enacted by state legislatures, and around the globe.

In June 2019, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in The Progressive, “Today, I’m grateful to the brave women who came before us and fought for the right of all American women to have a say in their own government. Thanks to their struggle, their persistence, and their determination to bring women the right to vote, I can stand here today as one of twenty-five women serving in the United States Senate, representing the great state of Wisconsin.” In the 2020 presidential election, more women voted than ever before (as well as more men and people of other genders). The national total of votes cast was 158,383,403. The proportion of registered women voters, and the proportion of those who actually turn out on election day, remains higher than that of men in every election since 1980, according to research by the Center for American Women and Politics.

This week on our website, Katherine van Wormer tells the story of her sister, attorney Flora Templeton Stuart, who successfully defended a woman in 1978 accused of illegally self-inducing an abortion. “Since the overturning of our constitutional right to have control over our [bodies], women like Marla [Pitchford] will face the possibility of jail for an illegal abortion,” Stuart tells her. “Marla’s case, while the first of its kind in 1978, will become the norm.” Also, Bill Lueders continues his investigation into the illegal evictions of elderly residents from care facilities. And Mike Ervin points out Republican duplicity in their professed support of Americans with disabilities.

At the United Nations, discussions are underway about a nuclear-free South Pacific, as Edward Hunt reports. Donald Cohen pens an op-ed warning that we are unprepared for a Monkeypox epidemic. Kimi Waite writes about the importance of the teaching of Asian American history in schools. And David Boddiger interviews Jodie Ginsberg, new president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, about the rise in threats to media workers around the globe. “I think it’s important to think about all threats that journalists face, not just the physical ones. We think about threats as being very much physical. A lot of that, these days, starts with online harassment,” she tells him. “We have to keep pushing for change. We have to keep pushing in these cases. We have to keep bringing them back to the authorities to investigate.”

There are two anniversaries of note this week. On August 23, we commemorate the ninety-fifth anniversary of the execution of labor activists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The Progressive (then called La Follette’s) covered this case, the trial, and its aftermath extensively with on-the-ground reporting by Elizabeth Glendower Evans. The anti-alien hysteria of that time sounds eerily familiar in some of the rhetoric heard in recent years from Donald Trump and others. One historian who spoke often of Sacco and Vanzetti was the late Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010). This Tuesday we will celebrate the centenary of his birth. Zinn was a long-time writer for The Progressive, and as Antonino D’Ambrosio wrote in this heartfelt tribute following Zinn’s death, “Zinn dedicated himself to the fight against forgetting and the struggle to honor history by telling the truth. For me, his work did more than pour a blazing light into the cracks of American history spackled over by the powerful to conceal the true stories that are shared by the majority of human beings: he made the invisible insurrection of the human spirit shine like a beacon in the dense fog of history.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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