Team Redstone to celebrate Women's Equality Day

Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville
Published Aug. 9, 2016
In honor of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Team Redstone is celebrating Women’s Equality Day 1:30 p.m. Aug. 23 in the Bob Jones Auditorium on Redstone Arsenal.

In honor of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Team Redstone is celebrating Women’s Equality Day 1:30 p.m. Aug. 23 in the Bob Jones Auditorium on Redstone Arsenal.

In honor of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Team Redstone is celebrating Women’s Equality Day 1:30 p.m. Aug. 23 in the Bob Jones Auditorium on Redstone Arsenal.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering and Support Center, Huntsville is the lead for the event. The celebration will include a tribute to “Rosie the Riveter” and special guest speaker Lee Marshall, who will also perform an original song.

Fictitious Rosie and real-life Marshall are examples of how far women have come in their fight for equality.

Marshall is the founder and chief executive officer of the Kids to Love Foundation and a three-time Emmy award winning journalist.

In foster care as a child, Marshall launched the foundation in 2004 to help foster children find homes and meet their immediate needs while they await adoption. Since then, the foundation has impacted the lives of more than 190,000 foster children.

Marshall’s work for the Kids to Love Foundation earned her a spot on the list of “500 Most Influential CEO’s in the World.”

Rosie impacted the lives of the whole country by revolutionizing the way society viewed women.

She represents the women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War ll, often helping make munitions and supplies for the war effort. Women who took on these occupations forever changed the “housewife” view society had of them.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement paved the way for women to become CEOs like Marshall and defeat female stereotypes like the factory workers during World War II.

Women’s Equality Day celebrates the brave men and women of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, who peacefully campaigned for and secured voting rights for women.

This success did not come without struggle though. The Women’s Rights Movement began in 1848 with the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

During the movement, women endured imprisonment, forced feedings during hunger strikes, pushback from the American people and the repeated denial of their right to vote.

After their hard fought battle to gain voting rights, they emerged victorious in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

To commemorate their efforts in achieving full voting rights, the U.S. Congress designated August 26 as Women’s Equality Day in 1971, according to the National Women’s History Project website.