President Barack Obama paid tribute to Americans who have championed women’s equality on Tuesday by designating a new national monument.
The newly-minted monument is the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, a stately, red-brick, Georgian-style dwelling in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The house has served as the headquarters for the National Woman’s Party since 1929.
Obama described the house — now called the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument — as “a hotbed of activism, a centerpiece for the struggle for equality, a monument to a fight not just for women’s equality but, ultimately, for equality for everybody,” according to The Washington Post.
“I want young girls and boys to come here, 10, 20, 100 years from now, to know that women fought for equality, it was not just given to them,” the president also said. “I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when women earned less than men for doing the same work. I want them to be astonished that there was ever a time when women were vastly outnumbered in the boardroom or in Congress, that there was ever a time when a woman had never sat in the Oval Office.”
Obama made his remarks at the new national landmark on Equal Pay Day, the day which allegedly represents how far into the year American women have to work to make as much as their male counterparts.
“I’m not here just to say we should close the wage gap,” Obama said, according to the Post. “I’m here to say we will close the wage gap.”
Equal Pay Day provides feminist organizations and gender pay-gap campaigners with the annual opportunity to peddle the generally suspect claim that women are paid substantially less than men for the same work. (RELATED: Pay Gap Alert: Clinton Foundation Male Execs Earn 38% More Than Women)
From the American Association of University Women to the White House, senior figures in public life lament that women across America make just 79 cents on the dollar compared to men.
The 79 cents claim suffers from the assumption that women in the U.S. are being paid substantially less for the exact same work, in the same jobs, working the same hours, with the same productivity and taking the same amount of time off, etc.
When President Barack Obama waded into the debate in 2012 claiming women were paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men, Politifact labeled his statement as “mostly false.”
Each year, economist after economist wearily takes to the keyboard to explain to pay gap fanatics that the gap has almost nothing to do with sexism and discrimination and that there are bigger factors at play. (RELATED: Equal Pay Day Fallacies Plague The Internet Once More)
The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, built around 1800, currently hosts panel discussion and other events related to women’s rights.
The National Park Service will now maintain the house and help manage the 38 or so visitors it receives each day.
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