VP swearing in marks a day in history

Whether you agree with the November presidential election results or not, history was made on Wednesday when Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn in.

There are some who do not appreciate the fact that she was elected vice president — they are more focused on her personal life and relationships. The old double standard always seems to rear its ugly head when discussing affairs that politicians have had. While it seems to be OK for men to stray from a marriage or to have an affair with a married woman, it’s not OK for a woman to do the same. We’re not condoning that sort of behavior for anyone — just pointing out a fact.

But all that double-standard stuff aside, like her or not, she is the first woman of color to be elected — and the first woman to hold that position. Women around the country should be proud. We’ve come a long way as a country, though that might be debated, considering what we witnessed the past four years.

When we look at history, it took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win the right for women to vote in the United States. On Aug. 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, which meant all American women, like men, were granted the right to vote. But more importantly, the amendment enfranchised all American women and declared that they also deserved all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

That didn’t mean the end to discrimination against women, however. They continued to suffer various forms of discrimination, from the jobs they were able to perform to the wages they were paid for those jobs.

In fact, Census Bureau data from 2018 shows that women of all races earned, on average, just 82 cents for every $1 earned by men of all races. The wage gap is even larger for most women of color.

We won’t even get into the racial discrimination that women have been through — and continue to go through in and out of the workplace.

The fact that we have a female vice president is a very welcome sight. She is living proof that women can achieve anything.

We hope that Harris serves the country well during her term. Who knows, maybe in four years, we could see our first female president of the United States. Now wouldn’t that be something?