19th Amendment

One of the problems that often come with history done on television is distinguishing hype from historical record.The bigger the budget, it seems, the greater the tendency for filmmakers to overstate the importance of their stories in an effort to get us inside their tents at the circus of prime-time programming -- especially in a sweeps ratings period like the one this month.Since his triumph with "The Civil War" and an exclusive underwriting deal with General Motors, no one has had bigger budgets to work with than documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, and no one makes bigger claims for the importance of each of the persons he studies.

Feb. 27 1922: The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed the right of women to vote. 1991: President George H.W. Bush declared that "Kuwait is liberated, Iraq's army is defeated," and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight.

1929: WARNING TO TEACHERS Notwithstanding ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote nine years earlier, women's rights still had a way to go as of 1929, as this item from the minutes of the Howard County Board of Education indicates. On Sept. 3, 1929, the board unanimously passed a resolution saying that "after the beginning of the school year, no more married teachers will be employed in the public schools of the county. If any of the young ladies teaching in the county should marry during the school term or at the close of the school, said teachers may consider her position vacant at once without further notice."

WTTR 1470-AM will broadcast Maryland State Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein's weekly radio program at 10:05 a.m. Sunday.This week's "Maryland Report Magazine" will focus on the role of Maryland women in their fight for the right to vote. The program marks the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, granting to women the right to vote.The 15-minute program will concentrate on Margaret Brent, a 17th-century lawyer who asked the Maryland General Assembly for the voting franchise; Anna Ella Carroll, an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln; Etta Maddox, one of the first women to take the bar exam; and Mary Elizabeth Walters Risteau, the first woman elected to the Maryland House of Delegates.

Editor: The U.S. has made great strides in the area of civil rights. Over the past 100 years, numerous laws have been passed to protect citizens from discrimination based on religion, sex, race, age, disability and veteran status. These laws include the 19th amendment to the Constitution, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the American with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994.

September 1920 was all about women in politics in Harford County. As a result of the recent passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, women were given the right to vote. The Aegis newspaper reported that the Republican women "will take their initial fling into local political matters when they convene in the Armory to elect a member of the Republican State Central Committee on September 14." The Aegis continued, "In order to get in the good graces of the ladies, our Republican leaders hit upon the plan of filling the existing vacancy with a lady, elected by popular vote.

FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE: SUSAN B. ANTHONY IN HER OWN WORDS. Lynn Sherr. Times Books. 382 pages. $23. WE WOMEN have to fight continually for our rights and after we get them we have to watch constantly for fear they will be taken away while our backs are turned, or just as we begin to feel safe and comfortable."

It was a simple and touching send-off for Olga von Hartz Owens at the Jenkins funeral home Tuesday morning. At the request of Mrs. Owens before she died at 101, the family played a recording of Beethoven's Archduke Trio before and after the service, which consisted entirely of talks about their mother by four of the five Owens children.The four, James, Olga, Gwinn and Lloyd, did not compare notes before their talks, but one theme was common: Mrs. Owens was an independent woman who considered herself a musician first -- she was a Peabody-trained violinist -- not a "housewife" and certainly not the little woman of Hamilton Owens, the late editor-in-chief of The Sun and Evening Sun.In 1938, she helped found the Women's String Symphony of Baltimore, partly to protest the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's banning of women musicians.

EVEN if 1995 were to end this week, it would go into the books as one of archeology's great years. Discovery follows discovery:* The tombs of Mesoamerican rulers, with decipherable inscriptions making possible the first tentative kinglists.* Vast Egyptian burials, apparently relatives of Ramses II.* A whole new gallery of underground, 20,000 B.C. paintings in southern France.It'll take years to glean and publish all the new knowledge. Peter Young, the former Evening Sun reporter who is now the editor of Archaeology, has a hard time squeezing the preliminary reports into his monthly magazine.

PREDICTION: Missing from the Republican National Platform in 2000 will be the GOP's 1996 appeal for elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. Republican governors meeting this week in Grand Rapids, Mich., got some mind-focusing news from their own party's election analysts. Bob Dole lost the women's vote by a whopping margin of 59 to 35 percent. And the most salient issue damaging to the GOP was education.National Committee chairman Haley Barbour lamented the party's failure to explain its education philosophy in more positive terms.