Construction for a new monument starts this week at the Ohio Statehouse, and it's the first one on the grounds of the state capitol to honor women.
It comes 125 years after women got the right to vote in the United States and during March, which has been designated nationally as Women's History Month.
League of Women Voters of Ohio executive director Jen Miller said women have made a lot of progress since getting the right to vote in 1920. But she said there’s a lot of work left to do.
“We are seeing a wide range of ways that our rights are being threatened," Miller said in an interview.
Miller said she's concerned that pending federal legislation called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility or SAVE America Act requires women to provide paperwork that is not required of men. She said she fears that would disenfranchise women voters.
“We are seeing some attempts to take away voting rights from married women if they would need to be able to provide, for example, their marriage certificate,” Miller said. “A lot of folks don’t have those, or maybe they would need to go to another state to be able to get it if that’s where they got married.”
President Trump has pushed hard for the SAVE America Act, and said late Sunday that there would not be a deal to end the partial government shutdown until Democrats join with Republicans to pass it.
Miller also noted Ohio doesn’t require equal pay for equal work. That’s covered in what's known as the Ohio Equal Rights Amendment. Backers are gathering signatures for that, but it’s a heavy lift since the Republican-dominated Ohio Ballot Board required the amendment to be broken into two issues, so backers have to circulate petitions for both. That means
collecting 413,487 valid signatures from 44 of Ohio's 88 counties on each by the beginning of July.
One of the two parts would codify same-sex marriage by nullifying a 2004 amendment defining marriage in Ohio as between one man and one woman. Activists are concerned about Ohio law on same-sex marriage as U.S. Supreme Court could take up the issue again, after ruling in 2015 that same-sex marriage is legal in a case brought against the Ohio Department of Health by Jim Obergefell.
The Ohio Women’s Monument honors the role the state played in the women’s suffrage movement. The monument is expected to be finished this summer.
