Women’s Equality Day 2026

Right now, somewhere in this country, a woman is doing math she never signed up for. A public defender fee here, a probation fee there, and a late fee on top of both because she doesn’t have enough money to settle the debts. Those aren’t her debts. They might belong to a sibling, a partner, a child, or a parent caught in the criminal legal system, but she is the one who pays. That’s what she has always done: hold the family together, whatever it costs her.

In this movement, you meet her again and again: she is rarely the person the system claims to be punishing, yet she is the person the system actually harms.

Today is Women’s Equality Day. It marks the morning in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was certified and, in the version of the story that usually gets told, women in the United States won the right to vote. But that isn’t the entire truth. For millions of Black women, especially across the South, access to that fundamental freedom to exercise the right to vote promised by the 19th Amendment was functionally withheld for another 45 years, until the apex of the civil rights movement forced the country to keep its promise. 

The hurdles are shorter now, but they are not entirely gone. In many places, unpaid court debt still stands between a person and their right to vote. Equality that stops at a collections notice is not true equality.

For a long time, we have measured the fines and fees fight in the language of individuals: this person’s debt, that person’s suspended license. Of course, that language is true, and it matters. But there’s another framework that helps depict its fuller shape, and I keep coming back to it.

This framework is known as Black Women Best. Conceived by economist Janelle Jones, it rests on a fundamental, transformative truth: an economy that enables Black women to flourish is an economy that finally serves us all. By centering policy on those bearing the greatest burdens, the reach of progress extends far beyond the point of origin. Indeed, when the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyzed fiscal strategies through this lens, they identified fines and fees as a predatory mechanism of extraction: one that disproportionately targets and depletes the resources of Black women.

Once you look at monetary sanctions through this lens, you stop asking only whether a penalty is fair to the person charged, and you start asking what it is doing to the women holding everything together. 

It has become a common turn in popular culture to depict Black women as superheroes. The ones who will save us. The ones who can and will be strong, and are expected to be strong in the face of the greatest adversities. I know many women who carry this burden and resilience with great pride. But the question the rest of us should be asking is, should they be carrying the burden of our failed systems?  Black women are frequently responsible for the debts of the people they love, even when they themselves have never been accused of anything. And they are far less likely than their white peers to have any padding to absorb this burden. A married, college-educated Black woman holds a median net wealth of roughly $45,000. That’s less than a fifth of that of her white counterpart. Fines and fees cut straight to the heart of that disparity.

There is a better way, and the framework points right to it. Eliminate the fees: charges that exist solely to compel people to pay for their own prosecution or detention. Make fines equitable, scaled to what a person can actually afford, so that one family’s minor inconvenience doesn’t become another’s slow-motion catastrophe. 

This is an achievable goal. Since 2018, the reforms we’ve led and supported alongside our partners have delivered at least $37.5 billion in financial relief. That’s money that stayed in communities instead of being pulled out of them. Every single dollar of relief was possible because somebody decided that a woman’s stability was worth fighting for.

That is the objective at the heart of Black Women Best. More than a century after the 19th Amendment, the work of women’s equality is still unfinished. Finishing it means what it has always meant in this work: eliminate the fees, make the fines fair. We have proof it works.

Let’s keep the promise, together.