Fifty-six years ago today, on 26 August 1970, the anniversary was doing double duty. It was fifty years to the day since the Nineteenth Amendment was certified, and the National Organization for Women, with Betty Friedan at the front of it, had called a Women's Strike for Equality: equal opportunity at work, childcare, and a say in the terms of one's own life. Marches went ahead in cities across the country.
The part I keep coming back to is the traffic management. The city had planned for a modest turnout in the evening rush and allotted the marchers a single lane of Fifth Avenue, which is the sort of arrangement that looks entirely reasonable on a clipboard. Then people kept arriving. The lane filled, and the next one, and at some point the sensible thing was simply to let the avenue go. Estimates for New York ran as high as fifty thousand, the largest gathering on behalf of women the country had yet seen.
A few years later Congress fixed the date in the calendar as Women's Equality Day, so the anniversary now carries two anniversaries inside it. Somewhere in a file there is presumably a memo about barricades that did not survive contact with the afternoon.
Marguerite, my favourite artefact of that afternoon is the banner reading "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot" — usually credited to a marcher in the New York crowd whose name has come down to us far less reliably than her pun. (Nineteen letters, one iron, fifty years of suffrage anniversary behind it.)
Marguerite, the book behind that crowd was The Feminine Mystique, 1963, and as I understand it the publisher was uneasy about the word mystique itself — too French, too vague, unsellable. It gave the century a phrase instead, along with the problem that has no name.