Tag Archives: 2017 suffrage centennial

It was a bittersweet moment in New York history on New Year’s Day with the second-term inauguration of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the death of his father, Mario M. Cuomo, three-term governor of New York on the same day. Cuomo’s highlighting of the woman’s suffrage movement in his inaugural address is a good sign as far as the State of New York coming to terms with its upcoming 2017 suffrage centennial. And the NYS Governor reinforced a mindset that hopefully will be repeated in the weeks and months to come and result in action.

From Andrew Cuomo’s inaugural speech:

“… When they were talking about a dream of women’s rights and women’s suffrage, where did they go? They went to New York. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, ‘Yes, we can do this,’ and it is the New York women who came together and organized and got women the right to vote. When they stood up and said in the ’60s, gays deserve equal rights, it was us, at Stonewall, who stood up and said, ‘That’s right, gay people deserve equal rights.’ New York was there first. When a big state had to pass marriage equality because we were discriminating against gay people, and not letting them marry was just another source of discrimination, and you needed a big state to stand up and pass it — and it was hard — it was New York that passed marriage equality. And it resonated all across the country.”

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