Nineteenth Amendment

The Law: Constitutional amendment making it illegal to deny a citizen the right to vote based on sex

Also known as: Susan B. Anthony Amendment; Women’s Suffrage Amendment

Date: Ratified on August 18, 1920

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1920, ensured that women could not be denied the right to vote by the federal government or the states based on their sex. Although American women did not emerge as a united voting bloc during the 1920s, this reform gave them more political influence and a better vantage point from which to pursue social and economic equality.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited the federal government and the individual states from denying citizens the right to vote based on race, sex-based voting discrimination was not yet prohibited by the beginning of the 1920s. Women could vote in some states, particularly in the western half of the country, but the majority prohibited women from voting or restricted female voters to specific kinds of elections, such as those for municipal offices. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 granted women the right to vote in all elections throughout the United States.

Suffrage Movements

The successful ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment occurred after more than seventy years of organization and demonstration by women’s rights activists throughout the United States. The first formal call for American women’s suffrage occurred at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Hosted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two antislavery reformers who had met at an 1840 conference that barred both from participation because of their sex, the Seneca Falls Convention produced the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which listed women’s grievances with their position in society, including their exclusion from the ballot box.

Although early women’s rights activists did not initially focus the majority of their efforts on winning the vote for women, the cause took on more importance by the mid-1860s, largely due to congressional actions following the Civil War. Throughout the United States’ early history, voting requirements were considered a state matter; however, in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution linked the number of a state’s representatives in Congress explicitly to the voting rights of male citizens. Likewise, the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, made it illegal to deny the right to vote to any citizen based on race or prior servitude but did not reference discrimination in suffrage rights based on sex.

These amendments suggested two things to women’s rights reformers: first, that an expansion of voting rights could be obtained through the passage and ratification of a constitutional amendment, and second, that women had been deliberately excluded from the categories of voters identified and protected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Two separate women’s rights organizations were founded and mobilized in light of these realizations. The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, in 1869, concentrated on trying to attain women’s suffrage on a state-by-state basis. The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded the same year by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, pursued a broader agenda for women’s rights that included attaining women’s suffrage through a constitutional amendment.

In spite of opposition, the NWSA orchestrated the introduction of a women’s suffrage amendment in Congress in 1878; however, it was not voted on until 1887, when it was defeated. The NWSA united with the AWSA in 1890, creating the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and the organization continued to work toward state- and amendment-based suffrage. Between 1869 and 1919, fifteen states granted women full suffrage: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Arizona, Oregon, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and New York. Limited suffrage was granted in twenty-five others. This meant that women from such states could exert political pressure on elected officials to pass an amendment to the Constitution granting the right to vote to women nationwide.

The unification of the women’s suffrage organizations also brought new women into the leadership of the movement, including Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, whose approaches to activism differed radically. As president of the NAWSA between 1915 and 1920, Catt initially focused on winning the support of President Woodrow Wilson and other political leaders for the cause. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, she urged NAWSA members to lend their efforts to supporting war work, whether that meant knitting bandages, selling victory bonds, or entering the workplace. Such efforts, she believed, would not only demonstrate that women were capable of performing necessary social services in times of national emergency but also convince national politicians, including President Wilson, that women’s wartime labors should be rewarded with the vote.

In contrast, Alice Paul established the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which sought to pressure political leaders directly. The NWP held President Wilson, as leader of the party in power, responsible for women’s lack of voting rights. In protest, members of the NWP picketed the White House, frequently holding signs suggesting that the United States was no more democratic than Germany. When NWP picketers were eventually arrested and imprisoned, they went on sensationalized hunger strikes that turned the protestors into martyrs for the cause of women’s suffrage.

Passage and Ratification

The combination of strategies employed by the NWP and NAWSA successfully pushed the House of Representatives to pass a women’s suffrage amendment in 1918 with the necessary two-thirds majority. The Senate failed to support the amendment that year, but when the House again passed the measure in the summer of 1919, the Senate followed suit. Women’s rights activists immediately turned their attention toward convincing the requisite thirty-six states to ratify the amendment by the fall of 1920 so women could participate in the November presidential election. Although a few states ratified the amendment almost immediately, women’s suffrage advocates had to persuade several governors to call special sessions of their state legislatures to secure ratification. Tennessee ratified the amendment on August 18, 1920, becoming the thirty-sixth state to do so. The necessary number of ratifications having been obtained, the Nineteenth Amendment was certified six days later and went into effect. Little more than two months later, the 1920 presidential election became the first in which all women in the United States were eligible to vote.

Impact

In the immediate years following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Congress passed legislation supported by female activists, including the Sheppard-Towner Act, which provided funding for infant and prenatal care. However, once it became clear that women did not vote as a bloc, legislation promoting women’s issues received no more attention than did other reform measures. In addition, women’s access to the ballot box did not result in a profound change in the political leadership of the United States. Although the number of female voters and politicians increased significantly after 1920, women continued to constitute a minority of both elected and appointed governmental officials into the early twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005. Explores how the private lives of Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, and Alice Paul affected their efforts to obtain women’s suffrage.

Camhi, Jane Jerome. Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880–1920. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1994. Examines the arguments and efforts of anti-suffragists to prevent the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Cott, Nancy F. “Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Woman’s Party.” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (June, 1984): 43–68. Briefly examines the role of the National Woman’s Party in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and then focuses on the actions of that organization in the 1920s to continue the fight for women’s political equality.

Flexner, Eleanor, and Ellen Fitzpatrick. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Provides a detailed survey of how female activists attained the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Wheeler, Majorie Spruill, ed. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, Oreg.: NewSage Press, 1995. Contains more than two dozen essays on specific individuals, events, and subjects related to the women’s suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.