Independence Day 2026

 It was on this day in 1919 that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was passed by the United States Congress. Women across America voted in their first national election in November of 1920.

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On the 250th Anniversary

Starhawk

Jul 4

When I was a young girl growing up in the ‘50s, we started every school day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Our hands on our hearts, we spoke those words day after day, until the idea became deeply ingrained in us, that this was indeed a country that offered liberty and justice for all.

I’ve always believed that the rebellion of the 1960s were sparked, not by our rejection of the American ideals, but from the shattering insight of just how far short our country fell from realizing them. In that era, I couldn’t have eaten a sandwich at a lunch counter a Black friend. Had I been old enough to get a credit card, as a woman I couldn’t have gotten one in my own name. Segregation ruled in the South, discrimination in the North, everywhere women were relegated to lower pay and lesser status, homosexuality was a crime while despoiling the environment was just the normal course of business. The government was meanwhile pursuing a brutal and senseless war in Vietnam, accompanied by a draft that impacted the men of my generation. We saw all that, we got mad, and we joined the Civil Rights movement, launched the peace movement, the feminist movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, the environmental movement, and so many more!

I know it’s fashionable among young people to denigrate the boomers, and many of my generation did give up their radical ideas and went into management or banking, while we benefited from social supports and opportunities young people today can only dream of. So I understand the resentment. But many of us held true to our values, and we’re still out there in the streets marching for No Kings, protesting ICE or demanding Free Palestine.

And that tradition of protest is itself truly American and ultimately patriotic. America has always been a work in progress, needing constant tending and course correction. While the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate today boldly asserts that all men are created equal, the Founding Fathers never meant ‘men’ to include women, or Black men, or First Nations men, or even Irish indentured servants. Equality was a radical idea in an era steeped in the traditions of kings and aristocrats, but Washington and Jefferson weren’t really radicals. They were the aristocrats of the New World, who wanted rights for men like themselves: white, educated property owners, men of a certain class. They didn’t want taxes levied without their consent, and they wanted the freedom to continue to expand their colonies westward into the territories of the indigenous tribes, an enterprise the English overlords wanted to stop, not out of sense of justice for the First Nations, but out of a disinclination to stir up more trouble on the borders and incite costly wars which England did not have the money to fight.

Lower taxes and colonial expansion are not very noble aims, yet equality is the foundational ideal for a just society. Liberty and justice for all--if we take that phrase seriously, if we truly mean for all and not for some--that too is the basis for the better world we all wish to see. Liberty for all implies responsibility, consideration and negotiation. For if we are all equal and we are all entitled to freedom, my freedom cannot override yours. I do not have the liberty to take your land, and you do not have the liberty to take my life. Liberties bump up against each other, and only justice can sort them out.

But justice is only just if it applies equally to all, without fear of reprisals by powerful people or favor to those of wealth and status. Those are the ideals we need right now to counter the cruelty, the corruption, and the injustice which have taken over our government, deeply damaged our social fabric and are destroying the common good.

Yet just as good people can do bad things in the name of their Gods and their beliefs, sometimes deeply flawed people might accidentally do good. Those slaveholding, prejudiced patriots who wrote the Declaration and hammered out the Constitution with all its unfortunate compromises, nonetheless embedded in it ideals that called forth something better than they themselves were capable of imagining.

So they gave birth, not just to a Republic, but to an environment that called forth liberation movement after liberation movement, from the Abolitionists of the 1800s To the Black Lives Matter activists of today.

It’s that long struggle to realize justice that I want to celebrate on this July 4th, and those ideals we must continue to stand for and to fight for. We must become the Founding Mothers, the Parents, the Grandparents of a nation we’ve only ever caught glimpses of, one that will not just give lip service to the beautiful ideals, but will live them fully, wrestle with their contradictions, and undertake the uncomfortable work of repair and regeneration. Today is a good day to pledge ourselves, not to a flag, not even to a republic, but to do what will be needed to make this country truly, at last, a land of liberty and justice for all.