Rachel Sadon
(Courtesy of the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum)
The country’s newest national monument is now dedicated to women’s equality.
President Barack Obama took the occasion of Equal Pay Day to designate the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument.
“A woman has to work this far into 2016 just to earn what a man earned in 2015. And what better place to commemorate this day than here at this house, where some of our country’s most important history took place,” Obama said at the dedication.
Previously known as the Sewall-Belmont House, the building became the home of the National Woman’s Party in 1929. From that base, members of the party authored hundreds of pieces of legislation in pursuit of women’s equality. The new monument is named for Alva Belmont and Alice Paul, a major benefactor and leader of the movement respectively.
“This house has a story to tell; this is the story of the national women’s party whose members fought to have their voices heard,” Obama said.
The NWP became an educational organization in 1997, turning the house at 2nd and Constitution Avenue in Southeast into a museum where they continue to teach about the movement’s unfinished work.
“I want young girls and boys to come here—10, 20, 100 years from now—to know that women fought for equality. It was not just given to them,” Obama said. “I want them to come here and be astonished that there was a time when women could not vote. I want them to be astonished that ever a time that women earned less than men for doing the same work…. that there was ever at time that a woman had never sat in the Oval Office.”
All thirteen members of the D.C. Council sent the president a letter earlier this month expressing their support for adding the museum to the National Park system.
“We remember in this house that no group has been given their rights without a struggle,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said in remarks this morning. Other speakers at the designation today included Senators Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Mikulski (the longest-serving woman in the Senate); senior advisor to the president Valerie Jarrett; and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.
