Our Daughters, Ourselves: On 'Women's Equality Day,' a Reality Check

Ninety years ago today, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote. It was revolutionary, for the time—Alice Paul, then a young political activist, was beaten, imprisoned, and force-fed for simply daring to say that women be engaged in political process. But if our grandmothers were born into a world where they weren’t allowed to have a political voice, what will the world look like for today’s young women? On the anniversary of women’s suffrage, a reality check:

* Today a young girl will learn that while she may be able to vote for president, she still probably won’t be one. Even the 3-year-old daughter of NEWSWEEK’s own (outgoing) editor knows this: after the 2008 election, she coolly informed her historian father that "girls can't be president." Ouch. Those faces on our dollar bills—42 men, not a single woman—really say it all.

* She’ll have to work harder if she wants to enter into politics, too. Sarah Palin may call herself a feminist, but women still hold just 16.8 percent of seats in Congress, and there are fewer than 20 female world leaders presently in power.

* She probably already lives on a street named after a man, as one study revealed. But maybe that won’t be terribly surprising—the vast majority of what she’s already watching on television each day is a fluid stream of men and more men. Of the 250 top-grossing movies produced last year, just 7 percent were directed by women; on-screen female protagonists are few and far between.