Festivities Celebrate Women’s Equality : Suffrage: Events at L.A. City Hall and nationwide mark the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote 75 years ago.

A number of firsts gathered outside Los Angeles City Hall on Women’s Equality Day. Katherine Sui Fun Cheung, 90, believed to be the first Chinese woman to learn to fly. Kathleen Connell, the first female elected state controller. And Lillian Garland, whose unprecedented U.S. Supreme Court case in 1987 stopped job discrimination against pregnant workers.

Cheung, Connell and Garland were among thousands of women who converged on city halls, convention centers and capitals across the nation Saturday to celebrate the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote 75 years ago.

“We are here to recognize that women persevered to become full citizens,” said Doris Isolini Nelson, 64, a former president of the League of Women Voters in Los Angeles. “Women today need to realize that without continuous effort they will lose the ability to influence what happens to them.”

Women’s Equality Day was filled with calls for equality by politicians, professional women and civil rights activists. But much of what the 19th Amendment has meant was personified by less public figures who chose to veer from more conventional paths.

Cheung of Thousands Oaks was one of them. Below the trees outside Los Angeles City Hall, she quietly signed autographs on envelopes bearing photos of her tugging the wooden prop of her vintage airplane. A big smile is on the face of the young woman.

Scores of women walked by her wearing white dresses and purple-and-gold sashes, the traditional colors of the suffrage movement. On the lapel of her sweater, Cheung wore the pin of a Fokker triplane, a World War I German fighter.

Rejected from flying schools in her native China, Cheung said she emigrated to the United States in 1931 to learn to fly. Her career as a stunt pilot and commercial pilot spanned 58 years.

During the 1930s, Cheung became a member of Amelia Earhart’s “99 Club” and occasionally raced against the famous aviatrix before Earhart disappeared in the South Pacific during a round-the-world flight.

“They told me in China that women should be in the kitchen, not in the cockpit,” Cheung said. “I wanted to be in the cockpit.”

In Washington, the anniversary was commemorated by an estimated 2,000 marchers, many of whom were also garbed in purple, white and gold like the original suffragettes. They retraced the same route, down Constitution Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, taken by participants in the first national march for suffrage in 1913.

“I came here to honor those women who went before our ‘foremothers,’ as they call them, for their enormous courage,” Gloria Cole, a director of the League of Women Voters in Maryland, told the Associated Press.

President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton marked the anniversary with statements from Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

They called it an appropriate site to celebrate women’s suffrage because in 1869, Wyoming, then still a territory, was the first jurisdiction in the United States to allow women to vote and hold office. It was also the first state to elect a woman governor.

The President, speaking in the shadows of the majestic Grand Teton range, said he was declaring Aug. 26 Women’s Equality Day to mark the amendment’s anniversary.

“The vote for women came at the end of an enormous philosophical war,” Clinton said. “It was bloodless, but it was highly costly. It literally consumed the lives of thousands of American women who were dedicated to gaining the right to vote. The dividends that were won we are still reaping today.”

In Orange County, about 250 people gathered at Santa Ana Civic Center’s Plaza of the Flags. The day was marked by two hours of music, song and speeches.

Though the mood was generally festive, speaker after speaker--one who scolded elected male public officials for being absent from the event--argued that the battle for equal rights is far from over.

“It took 72 years of constant struggle to win the vote,” said Rebecca Chadwick of the Orange County Coalition for the Celebration of Women’s Suffrage. “It’s very dear and was won at great cost. It should be celebrated.”

The suffrage movement began in 1848, when five women gathered over tea to plan a women’s convention in New York. They wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which stated that men and women were created equal and that both were endowed with certain inalienable rights. Above all, they demanded the right to vote.

For years, men ridiculed the movement, but by 1920, the year the 19th Amendment was ratified, both political parties supported it. The last votes to approve it came from Tennessee--the only Southern state to ratify the amendment. One young Tennessee House member supposedly cast a critical vote after receiving an encouraging note from his mother.

“I think 75 years ago, people would never believe how far women have gotten today,” said Connell, the California state controller.

Speaking in Los Angeles, Connell said that women in politics are more concerned than men with improving public health, education, social services and the welfare of children. She called on Gov. Pete Wilson to audit all departments of state government and find money for those programs.

“There’s a good ol’ boys network out there, and we are not part of it,” Connell said. “Women have a different perspective and it should be shown in government. . . . Just look at Ginger Rogers. She did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backward and in high heels.”

Reacting to the latest conservative drives to cut social service programs and restrict abortion, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) urged women to roll back “the forces of hate, fear and division” in the 1996 elections. “Watch out Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms.”

Standing at the City Hall steps below the speakers podium was John Abbott, 72, of Los Angeles--one of the few men who attended the event. He wore a purple and yellow sash. “I am here to celebrate the right to vote,” he said. “It is a precious heritage. We must vote.”

During World War II, Abbott, who now works for the League of Women Voters, refused to serve in the military because he objected to war and was convicted of Selective Service violations. Two years in prison followed. Upon his release, he learned he could no longer vote because he had a felony record.

Abbott, along with James Otsuka and Manuel Tally, sued to get back their right to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor in 1949. He says he has voted in every election since.

“All of this is just wonderful,” said Garland, 44, of Long Beach, who won a major victory for women’s rights in 1987. “I don’t think we are taken very seriously in politics or other professions. Let me just say, this shows we are serious. We are very serious.”

Garland, a heroine of the women’s rights movement, was working as a receptionist at California Federal Savings & Loan Assn. in Los Angeles in 1982 when she went on maternity leave for three months. Upon Garland’s return to work, she was told her job had been filled by a woman she had trained.

Garland sued California Federal for discrimination. Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law that grants pregnant employees the right to a four-month leave to have a child without fear of losing their jobs.

After winning the case, Garland worked as a real estate agent and an insurance broker. She is now recruiting businesses for a U.S. Labor Department program to help improve working conditions for women.

“I went through hell during that lawsuit,” Garland said. “I was evicted. I lost the custody of my daughter for awhile. But I think it was worth it, well worth it.”

Times staff writer John M. Broder in Wyoming and Times correspondent Martin Miller in Orange County contributed to this story.