“Don’t Look At Me, I Just Got Here Myself.”

Contemplating the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut on the 101st anniversary of U.S. women’s suffrage and the fall of Afghanistan.

14-yr. old striker, Fola La Follette, and Rose Livingston. Glass negative from the George Grantham Bain Collection, 1913. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. Photograph shows suffrage and labor activist Flora Dodge “Fola” La Follette (1882–1970), social reformer and missionary Rose Livingston, and a young striker during a garment strike in New York City in 1913. (photo: Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash)

Only 101 short years ago today, women in the United States were granted the right to vote by the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Into every industry female entrepreneurs, inventors, mathematicians, engineers, teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, writers, factory workers, steel-makers, special-forces soldiers, and politicians have since proliferated, slowly perhaps, but surely.

Two women recently climbed to unprecedented heights of political power, breaking new ground and old glass ceilings; first female Vice President Kamala Harris and first female Governor of New York Kathy Hochul.

There is still plenty of work to be done as far as women’s equality in concerned, in the U.S. and around the world. There are still places where women are still considered and treated as second-class citizens, if that.

But even in some places ranked low on the international index of women’s rights, there have been marked improvements. Women in Saudi Arabia, for instance, must still operate in society under many special restrictions; but they can drive.