Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
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The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Initially introduced to Congress in 1878, several attempts to pass a women's suffrage amendment failed until passing the House of Representatives on May 21, 1919, followed by the Senate on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee was the last of the necessary 36 states to secure ratification. The Nineteenth Amendment was officially adopted on August 26, 1920: the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage at both state and national levels.
Prior to 1776, women had the right to vote in several of the colonies in what would become the United States, but by 1807 every state constitution denied even limited suffrage. Organizations supporting women's rights became more active in the mid-nineteenth century and, in 1848, the Seneca Falls convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, which called for equality between the sexes and included a resolution urging women to secure the vote. Pro-suffrage organizations used a variety of tactics including legal arguments that relied on existing amendments. After those arguments were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, suffrage organizations, with activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called for a new constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote.
By the late nineteenth century, new states and territories, particularly in the West, began to grant women the right to vote. In 1878, a suffrage proposal that would eventually become the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced to Congress, but it was rejected in 1887. In the 1890s, suffrage organizations focused on a national amendment while still working at the state and local levels. Lucy Burns and Alice Paul emerged as important leaders whose different strategies helped move the Nineteenth Amendment forward. Entry of the United States into World War I helped to shift public perception of women's suffrage. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, supported the war effort, making the case that women should be rewarded with enfranchisement for their patriotic wartime service. The National Woman's Party staged marches, demonstrations, and hunger strikes while pointing out the contradictions of fighting abroad for democracy while limiting it at home by denying women the right to vote. The work of both organizations swayed public opinion, prompting President Wilson to announce his support of the suffrage amendment in 1918. It passed in 1919 and was adopted in 1920, withstanding two legal challenges, Leser v. Garnett and Fairchild v. Hughes.
The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election, but the powerful women's voting bloc that many politicians feared failed to fully materialize until decades later. As well, the Nineteenth Amendment failed to fully enfranchise African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American women. Shortly after the amendment's adoption, Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party began work on the Equal Rights Amendment, which they believed a necessary additional step to ensure equality.
Early Woman Suffrage Efforts (1776–1865)
The United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, left the boundaries of suffrage undefined. The only directly elected body created under the original Constitution was the U.S. House of Representatives, for which voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states. While women had the right to vote in several of the pre-revolutionary colonies in what would become the United States, after 1776, with the exception of New Jersey, all states adopted constitutions that denied voting rights to women. New Jersey's constitution initially granted suffrage to property-holding residents, including single and married women, but the state rescinded women's voting rights in 1807 and did not restore them until New Jersey ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
While scattered movements and organizations dedicated to women's rights existed previously, the 1848 Seneca Falls convention in New York is traditionally held as the start of the American women's rights movement. Attended by nearly 300 women and men, the convention was designed to "discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women", and culminated in the adoption of the Declaration of Sentiments. Signed by 68 women and 32 men, the ninth of the document's twelve resolved clauses reads, "Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." Conveners Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became key early leaders in the U.S. women's suffrage movement, often referred to at the time as the "woman suffrage movement". Mott's support of women's suffrage stemmed from as summer spent with the Seneca Nation, one of the six tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy, where women had significant political power, including the right to choose and remove chiefs and veto acts of war.
Activism addressing federal women's suffrage was minimal during the Civil War. In 1865, at the conclusion of the war, a "Petition for Universal Suffrage", signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, among others, called for a national constitutional amendment to "prohibit the several states from disenfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex". The campaign was the first national petition drive to feature woman suffrage among its demands. While suffrage bills were introduced into many state legislatures during this period, they were generally disregarded and few came to a vote.
Reconstruction Amendments and Woman Suffrage (1865–1877)
The women's suffrage movement, delayed by the American Civil War, resumed activities during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). Two rival suffrage organizations formed in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone. The NWSA's main effort was lobbying Congress for a women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The AWSA generally focused on a long-term effort of state campaigns to achieve women's suffrage on a state-by-state basis.
During the Reconstruction era, women's rights leaders advocated for inclusion of universal suffrage as a civil right in the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments). Some unsuccessfully argued that the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying voting rights "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude", implied suffrage for women. Despite their efforts, these amendments did not enfranchise women. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly discriminated between men and women by only penalizing states which deprived adult male citizens of the vote.
The NWSA attempted several unsuccessful court challenges in the mid-1870s. Their legal argument, known as the "New Departure" strategy, contended that the Fourteenth Amendment (granting universal citizenship) and Fifteenth Amendment (granting the vote irrespective of race) together guaranteed voting rights to women. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument. In Bradwell v. Illinois the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Supreme Court of Illinois's refusal to grant Myra Bradwell a license to practice law was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution and refused to extend federal authority in support of women's citizenship rights. In Minor v. Happersett the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not provide voting rights to U.S. citizens; it only guaranteed additional protection of privileges to citizens who already had them. If a state constitution limited suffrage to male citizens of the United States, then women in that state did not have voting rights. After U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1873 and 1875 denied voting rights to women in connection with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, suffrage groups shifted their efforts to advocating for a new constitutional amendment.
Continued settlement of the western frontier, along with the establishment of territorial constitutions, allowed the women's suffrage issue to be raised as the western territories progressed toward statehood. Through the Activism of suffrage organizations and independent political parties, women's suffrage was included in the constitutions of Wyoming Territory (1869) and Utah Territory (1870). Women's suffrage in Utah was revoked in 1887, when Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887 that also prohibited polygamy; it was not restored in Utah until it achieved statehood in 1896.
Post-Reconstruction (1878–1910)
Existing state legislatures in the West, as well as those east of the Mississippi River, began to consider suffrage bills in the 1870s and 1880s. Several held voter referendums, but they were unsuccessful until the suffrage movement was revived in the 1890s. Full women's suffrage continued in Wyoming after it became a state in 1890. Colorado granted partial voting rights that allowed women to vote in school board elections in 1893 and Idaho granted women suffrage in 1896. Beginning with Washington in 1910, seven more western states passed women's suffrage legislation, including California in 1911, Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas in 1912, Alaska Territory in 1913, and Montana and Nevada in 1914. All states that were successful in securing full voting rights for women before 1920 were located in the West.
A federal amendment intended to grant women the right to vote was introduced in the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1878 by Aaron A. Sargent, a Senator from California who was a women's suffrage advocate. Stanton and other women testified before the Senate in support of the amendment. The proposal sat in a committee until it was considered by the full Senate and rejected in a 16-to-34 vote in 1887. An amendment proposed in 1888 in the U.S. House of Representatives called for limited suffrage for women who were spinsters or widows who owned property.
By the 1890s, suffrage leaders began to recognize the need to broaden their base of support to achieve success in passing suffrage legislation at the national, state, and local levels. While western women, state suffrage organizations, and the AWSA concentrated on securing women's voting rights for specific states, efforts at the national level persisted through a strategy of congressional testimony, petitioning, and lobbying. After the AWSA and NWSA merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the group directed its efforts to win state-level support for suffrage. Suffragists had to campaign publicly for the vote in order to convince male voters, state legislators, and members of Congress that American women wanted to be enfranchised and that women voters would benefit American society. Suffrage supporters also had to convince American women, many of whom were indifferent to the issue, that suffrage was something they wanted. Apathy among women was an ongoing obstacle that the suffragists had to overcome through organized grassroots efforts. Despite the suffragists' efforts, no state granted women suffrage between 1896 and 1910, and the NAWSA shifted its focus toward passage of a national constitutional amendment. Suffragists also continued to press for the right to vote in individual states and territories while retaining the goal of federal recognition.
African-American Woman Suffrage Efforts
Thousands of African-American women were active in the suffrage movement, addressing issues of race, gender, and class, as well as enfranchisement, often through the church but eventually through organizations devoted to specific causes. While white women sought the vote to gain an equal voice in the political process, African-American women often sought the vote as a means of racial uplift and as a way to effect change in the post-Reconstruction era. Notable African-American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett advocated for suffrage in tandem with civil rights for African-Americans.
As early as 1866, in Philadelphia, Margaretta Forten and Harriet Forten Purvis helped to found the Philadelphia Suffrage Association; Purvis would go on to serve on the executive committee of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization that supported suffrage for women and for African-American men. A national movement in support of suffrage for African-American women began in earnest with the rise of the black women's club movement. In 1896, club women belonging to various organizations promoting women's suffrage met in Washington, D.C. to form the National Association of Colored Women, of which Frances E.W. Harper, Josephine St. Pierre, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells Barnett were founding members. Led by Mary Church Terrell, it was the largest federation of African-American women's clubs in the nation. After 1914 it became the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.
When the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised African-American men, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony abandoned the AERA, which supported universal suffrage, to found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, stating that black men should not receive the vote before white women. In response, African-American suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others joined the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported suffrage for women and for black men. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the second African-American woman to receive a degree from Howard University Law School, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1878 when she delivered their convention's keynote address. Tensions between African-American and white suffragists persisted, even after the NWSA and AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
By the early 1900s, white suffragists often adopted strategies designed to appease the Southern states at the expense of African-American women. At conventions in 1901 and 1903, in Atlanta and New Orleans, NAWSA prevented African Americans from attending. At the 1911 national NAWSA conference, Martha Gruening asked the organization to formally denounce white supremacy. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw refused, saying that she was "in favor of colored people voting," but did not want to alienate others in the suffrage movement. Even NAWSA's more radical Congressional Committee, which would become the National Woman's Party, failed African-American women, most visibly by refusing to allow them to march in the nation's first suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. While the NAWSA directed Paul not to exclude African-American participants, 72 hours before the parade African-American women were directed to the back of the parade; Ida B. Wells defied these instructions and joined the Illinois unit, prompting telegrams of support.
A New Focus on a Federal Amendment
In 1900, Carrie Chapman Catt succeeded Susan B. Anthony as the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt revitalized NAWSA, turning the focus of the organization to the passage of the federal amendment while simultaneously supporting women who wanted to pressure their states to pass suffrage legislation. The strategy, which she later called "The Winning Plan", had several goals: women in states that had already granted presidential suffrage (the right to vote for the President) would focus on passing a federal suffrage amendment; women who believed they could influence their state legislatures would focus on amending their state constitutions and Southern states would focus on gaining primary suffrage (the right to vote in state primaries). Simultaneously, the NAWSA worked to elect congressmen who supported suffrage for women. By 1915, NAWSA was a large, powerful organization, with 44 state chapters and over 2 million members.
In a break with NAWSA, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage in 1913 to pressure the federal government to take legislative action. One of their first acts was to organize a women's suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. The procession of more than 5,000 participants, the first of its kind, attracted a crowd of an estimated 500,000, as well as national media attention, but Wilson took no immediate action. In March 1917, the Congressional Union joined with Women's Party of Western Voters to form the National Woman's Party (NWP), whose aggressive tactics included staging more radical acts of civil disobedience and controversial demonstrations to draw more attention to the women's suffrage issue.
Ratification
Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul immediately mobilized members of the NAWSA and NWP to pressure states to ratify the amendment. Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan did so, their legislatures being in session. By July, Montana, Arkansas, and Nebraska had approved ratification. In other states support proved more difficult to secure. Much of the opposition to the amendment came from Southern Democrats; only one southern state (Texas) and four border states had voted for ratification. Alabama and Georgia were the first states to defeat ratification. The governor of Louisiana worked to organize 13 states to resist ratifying the amendment. The Maryland legislature refused to ratify the amendment and attempted to prevent other states from doing so. Carrie Catt began appealing to Western governors, encouraging them to act swiftly. By the end of 1919, a total of 22 states had ratified the amendment.
Resistance to ratification took many forms: anti-suffragists continued to state that the amendment would never be approved by the November, 1920 elections and that special sessions were a waste of time and effort. Other opponents to ratification filed lawsuits requiring the federal amendment to be approved by state referendums. By June, 1920, after intense lobbying by both the NAWSA and the NWP, the amendment was ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. Ratification would be determined by Tennessee. In the middle of July, 1919, both opponents and supporters of the Anthony Amendment arrived in Nashville to lobby the General Assembly. Carrie Catt, representing the NAWSA, worked with state suffragist leaders, including Anne Dallas Dudley and Abby Crawford Milton. Sue Shelton White, a Tennessee native who had participated in protests at the White House and toured with the Prison Special, represented the NWP.
Opposing them were the "Antis", in particular, Josephine Pearson, state president of the Southern Women's Rejection League of the Susan. B. Anthony Amendment, who had served as dean and chair of philosophy at Christian College in Columbia. Pearson was assisted by Anne Pleasant, president of the Louisiana Women's Rejection League and the wife of a former Louisiana governor. Especially in the South, the question of women's suffrage was closely tied to issues of race. While both white and African-American women worked toward women's suffrage, some white suffragists tried to appease southern states by arguing that votes for women could counter the black vote, strengthening white supremacy. For the anti-suffragists in the south (the "Antis"), the federal amendment was viewed as a "Force Bill", one that Congress could use to enforce voting provisions not only for women, but for African-American men who were still effectively disenfranchised even after passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Carrie Catt warned suffrage leaders in Tennessee that the "Anti-Suffs" would rely on "lies, innuendoes, and near truths", raising the issue of race as a powerful factor in their arguments.
Prior to the start of the General Assembly session on August 9, both supporters and opponents had lobbied members of the Tennessee Senate and House of Representatives. Though the Democratic governor of Tennessee, Albert H. Roberts, supported ratification, most lawmakers were still undecided. anti-suffragists targeted members, meeting their trains as they arrived in Nashville to make their case. When the General Assembly convened on August 9, both supporters and opponents set up stations outside of chambers, handing out yellow roses to suffrage supporters and red roses to the "Antis". On August 12, the legislature held hearings on the suffrage proposal; the next day the Senate voted 24-5 in favor of ratification. As the House prepared to take up the issue of ratification on August 18, lobbying intensified. House Speaker Seth M. Walker attempted to table the ratification resolution, but was defeated twice with a vote of 48-48. The vote on the resolution would be close. Representative Harry Burn, a Republican, had voted to table the resolution both times. When the vote was held again, Burn voted yes. The 24-year-old said he supported women's suffrage as a "moral right", but had voted against it because he believed his constituents opposed it. In the final minutes before the vote, he received a note from his mother, urging him to vote yes. Rumors immediately circulated that Burn and other lawmakers had been bribed, but newspaper reporters found no evidence of this.
The same day that ratification passed in the General Assembly, Speaker Walker filed a motion to reconsider. When it became clear that he did not have enough votes to carry the motion, representatives opposing suffrage boarded a train, fleeing Nashville for Decatur, Alabama to block the House from taking action on the reconsideration motion by preventing a quorum. Thirty-seven legislators fled to Decatur, issuing a statement that ratifying the amendment would violate their oath to defend the state constitution. The ploy failed. Speaker Walker was unable to muster any additional votes in the allotted time. When the House reconvened to take the final procedural steps that would reaffirm ratification, Tennessee suffragists seized an opportunity to taunt the missing Anti delegates by sitting at their empty desks. When ratification was finally confirmed, a suffragist on the floor of the House rang a miniature Liberty Bell.
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly approved the Nineteenth Amendment, with 50 of 99 members of the Tennessee House of Representatives voting yes. Upon signing the ratification certificate, the Governor of Tennessee sent it by registered mail to the U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, whose office received it at 4:00 a.m. on August 26, 1920. Once certified as correct, Colby signed the Proclamation of the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the presence of his secretary only, making the Nineteenth Amendment officially law as of that date. This provided the final ratification necessary to add the amendment to the Constitution, making the United States the twenty-seventh country in the world to give women the right to vote.
Women's Voting Behavior
Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Many legislators feared that a powerful women's bloc would emerge in American politics. This fear led to the passage of such laws as the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s. Newly enfranchised women and women's groups prioritized a reform agenda rather than party loyalty and their first goal was the Sheppard-Towner Act. It was the first federal social security law and made a dramatic difference before it was allowed to lapse in 1929. Other efforts at the federal level in the early 1920s that related to women labor and women's citizenship rights included the establishment of a Women's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1920 and passage of the Cable Act in 1922. After the U.S. presidential election in 1924, politicians realized that the women's bloc they had feared did not actually exist and they did not need to cater to what they considered as "women's issues" after all. The eventual appearance of an American women's voting bloc has been tracked to various dates, depending on the source, from the 1950s to 1970. Around 1980, a nationwide gender gap in voting had emerged, with women usually favoring the Democratic candidate in presidential elections.
According to political scientists J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, few women turned out to vote in the first national elections after the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to do so. In 1920, 36 percent of eligible women turned out to vote (compared with 68 percent of men). The low turnout among women was partly due to other barriers to voting, such as literacy tests, long residency requirements and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept turnout low. The participation gap was lowest between men and women in swing states at the time, in states that had closer races such as Missouri and Kentucky, and where barriers to voting were lower. By 1960, women were turning out to vote in presidential elections in greater numbers than men and a trend of higher female voting engagement has continued into 2018.
Limitations
African-American women
African-Americans had gained the right to vote, but for 75 percent of them it was granted in name only, as state constitutional loopholes kept them from exercising that right. Prior to the passage of the amendment, southern politicians held firm in their convictions not to allow African-American women to vote. They had to fight to not only secure their own right to vote, but the right of African-American men as well.
Three million women south of the Mason-Dixon line remained disfranchised after the passage of the amendment. Election officials regularly obstructed access to the ballot box. As newly enfranchised African-American women attempted to register, officials increased methods of what Brent Staples, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, described as fraud, intimidation, poll taxes, and state violence. In 1926, a group of women attempting to register in Birmingham, Alabama were beaten by officials. Incidents such as this, threats of violence and job losses, and legalized prejudicial practices blocked women of color from voting. Not until the Twenty-fourth Amendment was adopted in 1962, were Congress and the states prohibited from making voting conditional on poll or other taxes, paving the way to more reforms with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
African-Americans continued to face barriers preventing them from exercising their vote until a new movement arose in the 1950s and 1960s, which posited voting rights as civil rights. Nearly a thousand civil rights workers converged on the South to support voting rights as part of Freedom Summer. However, state officials continued to refuse registration until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. For the first time, states were forbidden from imposing discriminatory restrictions on voting eligibility, and mechanisms were placed allowing the federal government to enforce its provisions.
Other minority groups
Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924, but state policies prohibited them from voting. In 1948, a suit brought by World War II veteran Miguel Trujillo resulted in Native Americans gaining the right to vote in New Mexico and Arizona, but some states continued to bar them from voting until 1957.
Poll taxes and literacy tests kept Latina women from voting. In Puerto Rico, for example, women did not receive the right to vote until 1929, but was limited to literate women until 1935. Further, the 1975 extensions of the Voting Rights Act included requiring bilingual ballots and voting materials in certain regions, making it easier for Latina women to vote.
Prior to 1776, women had the right to vote in several of the colonies in what would become the United States, but by 1807 every state constitution denied even limited suffrage. Organizations supporting women's rights became more active in the mid-nineteenth century and, in 1848, the Seneca Falls convention adopted the Declaration of Sentiments, which called for equality between the sexes and included a resolution urging women to secure the vote. Pro-suffrage organizations used a variety of tactics including legal arguments that relied on existing amendments. After those arguments were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, suffrage organizations, with activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, called for a new constitutional amendment that would guarantee women the right to vote.
By the late nineteenth century, new states and territories, particularly in the West, began to grant women the right to vote. In 1878, a suffrage proposal that would eventually become the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced to Congress, but it was rejected in 1887. In the 1890s, suffrage organizations focused on a national amendment while still working at the state and local levels. Lucy Burns and Alice Paul emerged as important leaders whose different strategies helped move the Nineteenth Amendment forward. Entry of the United States into World War I helped to shift public perception of women's suffrage. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, supported the war effort, making the case that women should be rewarded with enfranchisement for their patriotic wartime service. The National Woman's Party staged marches, demonstrations, and hunger strikes while pointing out the contradictions of fighting abroad for democracy while limiting it at home by denying women the right to vote. The work of both organizations swayed public opinion, prompting President Wilson to announce his support of the suffrage amendment in 1918. It passed in 1919 and was adopted in 1920, withstanding two legal challenges, Leser v. Garnett and Fairchild v. Hughes.
The Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election, but the powerful women's voting bloc that many politicians feared failed to fully materialize until decades later. As well, the Nineteenth Amendment failed to fully enfranchise African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American women. Shortly after the amendment's adoption, Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party began work on the Equal Rights Amendment, which they believed a necessary additional step to ensure equality.
Early Woman Suffrage Efforts (1776–1865)
The United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, left the boundaries of suffrage undefined. The only directly elected body created under the original Constitution was the U.S. House of Representatives, for which voter qualifications were explicitly delegated to the individual states. While women had the right to vote in several of the pre-revolutionary colonies in what would become the United States, after 1776, with the exception of New Jersey, all states adopted constitutions that denied voting rights to women. New Jersey's constitution initially granted suffrage to property-holding residents, including single and married women, but the state rescinded women's voting rights in 1807 and did not restore them until New Jersey ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
While scattered movements and organizations dedicated to women's rights existed previously, the 1848 Seneca Falls convention in New York is traditionally held as the start of the American women's rights movement. Attended by nearly 300 women and men, the convention was designed to "discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women", and culminated in the adoption of the Declaration of Sentiments. Signed by 68 women and 32 men, the ninth of the document's twelve resolved clauses reads, "Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." Conveners Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton became key early leaders in the U.S. women's suffrage movement, often referred to at the time as the "woman suffrage movement". Mott's support of women's suffrage stemmed from as summer spent with the Seneca Nation, one of the six tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy, where women had significant political power, including the right to choose and remove chiefs and veto acts of war.
Activism addressing federal women's suffrage was minimal during the Civil War. In 1865, at the conclusion of the war, a "Petition for Universal Suffrage", signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, among others, called for a national constitutional amendment to "prohibit the several states from disenfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex". The campaign was the first national petition drive to feature woman suffrage among its demands. While suffrage bills were introduced into many state legislatures during this period, they were generally disregarded and few came to a vote.
Reconstruction Amendments and Woman Suffrage (1865–1877)
The women's suffrage movement, delayed by the American Civil War, resumed activities during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). Two rival suffrage organizations formed in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone. The NWSA's main effort was lobbying Congress for a women's suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The AWSA generally focused on a long-term effort of state campaigns to achieve women's suffrage on a state-by-state basis.
During the Reconstruction era, women's rights leaders advocated for inclusion of universal suffrage as a civil right in the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments). Some unsuccessfully argued that the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denying voting rights "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude", implied suffrage for women. Despite their efforts, these amendments did not enfranchise women. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly discriminated between men and women by only penalizing states which deprived adult male citizens of the vote.
The NWSA attempted several unsuccessful court challenges in the mid-1870s. Their legal argument, known as the "New Departure" strategy, contended that the Fourteenth Amendment (granting universal citizenship) and Fifteenth Amendment (granting the vote irrespective of race) together guaranteed voting rights to women. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this argument. In Bradwell v. Illinois the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Supreme Court of Illinois's refusal to grant Myra Bradwell a license to practice law was not a violation of the U.S. Constitution and refused to extend federal authority in support of women's citizenship rights. In Minor v. Happersett the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not provide voting rights to U.S. citizens; it only guaranteed additional protection of privileges to citizens who already had them. If a state constitution limited suffrage to male citizens of the United States, then women in that state did not have voting rights. After U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1873 and 1875 denied voting rights to women in connection with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, suffrage groups shifted their efforts to advocating for a new constitutional amendment.
Continued settlement of the western frontier, along with the establishment of territorial constitutions, allowed the women's suffrage issue to be raised as the western territories progressed toward statehood. Through the Activism of suffrage organizations and independent political parties, women's suffrage was included in the constitutions of Wyoming Territory (1869) and Utah Territory (1870). Women's suffrage in Utah was revoked in 1887, when Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887 that also prohibited polygamy; it was not restored in Utah until it achieved statehood in 1896.
Post-Reconstruction (1878–1910)
Existing state legislatures in the West, as well as those east of the Mississippi River, began to consider suffrage bills in the 1870s and 1880s. Several held voter referendums, but they were unsuccessful until the suffrage movement was revived in the 1890s. Full women's suffrage continued in Wyoming after it became a state in 1890. Colorado granted partial voting rights that allowed women to vote in school board elections in 1893 and Idaho granted women suffrage in 1896. Beginning with Washington in 1910, seven more western states passed women's suffrage legislation, including California in 1911, Oregon, Arizona, and Kansas in 1912, Alaska Territory in 1913, and Montana and Nevada in 1914. All states that were successful in securing full voting rights for women before 1920 were located in the West.
A federal amendment intended to grant women the right to vote was introduced in the U.S. Senate for the first time in 1878 by Aaron A. Sargent, a Senator from California who was a women's suffrage advocate. Stanton and other women testified before the Senate in support of the amendment. The proposal sat in a committee until it was considered by the full Senate and rejected in a 16-to-34 vote in 1887. An amendment proposed in 1888 in the U.S. House of Representatives called for limited suffrage for women who were spinsters or widows who owned property.
By the 1890s, suffrage leaders began to recognize the need to broaden their base of support to achieve success in passing suffrage legislation at the national, state, and local levels. While western women, state suffrage organizations, and the AWSA concentrated on securing women's voting rights for specific states, efforts at the national level persisted through a strategy of congressional testimony, petitioning, and lobbying. After the AWSA and NWSA merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the group directed its efforts to win state-level support for suffrage. Suffragists had to campaign publicly for the vote in order to convince male voters, state legislators, and members of Congress that American women wanted to be enfranchised and that women voters would benefit American society. Suffrage supporters also had to convince American women, many of whom were indifferent to the issue, that suffrage was something they wanted. Apathy among women was an ongoing obstacle that the suffragists had to overcome through organized grassroots efforts. Despite the suffragists' efforts, no state granted women suffrage between 1896 and 1910, and the NAWSA shifted its focus toward passage of a national constitutional amendment. Suffragists also continued to press for the right to vote in individual states and territories while retaining the goal of federal recognition.
African-American Woman Suffrage Efforts
Thousands of African-American women were active in the suffrage movement, addressing issues of race, gender, and class, as well as enfranchisement, often through the church but eventually through organizations devoted to specific causes. While white women sought the vote to gain an equal voice in the political process, African-American women often sought the vote as a means of racial uplift and as a way to effect change in the post-Reconstruction era. Notable African-American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett advocated for suffrage in tandem with civil rights for African-Americans.
As early as 1866, in Philadelphia, Margaretta Forten and Harriet Forten Purvis helped to found the Philadelphia Suffrage Association; Purvis would go on to serve on the executive committee of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), an organization that supported suffrage for women and for African-American men. A national movement in support of suffrage for African-American women began in earnest with the rise of the black women's club movement. In 1896, club women belonging to various organizations promoting women's suffrage met in Washington, D.C. to form the National Association of Colored Women, of which Frances E.W. Harper, Josephine St. Pierre, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells Barnett were founding members. Led by Mary Church Terrell, it was the largest federation of African-American women's clubs in the nation. After 1914 it became the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.
When the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised African-American men, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony abandoned the AERA, which supported universal suffrage, to found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, stating that black men should not receive the vote before white women. In response, African-American suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others joined the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported suffrage for women and for black men. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the second African-American woman to receive a degree from Howard University Law School, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1878 when she delivered their convention's keynote address. Tensions between African-American and white suffragists persisted, even after the NWSA and AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
By the early 1900s, white suffragists often adopted strategies designed to appease the Southern states at the expense of African-American women. At conventions in 1901 and 1903, in Atlanta and New Orleans, NAWSA prevented African Americans from attending. At the 1911 national NAWSA conference, Martha Gruening asked the organization to formally denounce white supremacy. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw refused, saying that she was "in favor of colored people voting," but did not want to alienate others in the suffrage movement. Even NAWSA's more radical Congressional Committee, which would become the National Woman's Party, failed African-American women, most visibly by refusing to allow them to march in the nation's first suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. While the NAWSA directed Paul not to exclude African-American participants, 72 hours before the parade African-American women were directed to the back of the parade; Ida B. Wells defied these instructions and joined the Illinois unit, prompting telegrams of support.
A New Focus on a Federal Amendment
In 1900, Carrie Chapman Catt succeeded Susan B. Anthony as the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt revitalized NAWSA, turning the focus of the organization to the passage of the federal amendment while simultaneously supporting women who wanted to pressure their states to pass suffrage legislation. The strategy, which she later called "The Winning Plan", had several goals: women in states that had already granted presidential suffrage (the right to vote for the President) would focus on passing a federal suffrage amendment; women who believed they could influence their state legislatures would focus on amending their state constitutions and Southern states would focus on gaining primary suffrage (the right to vote in state primaries). Simultaneously, the NAWSA worked to elect congressmen who supported suffrage for women. By 1915, NAWSA was a large, powerful organization, with 44 state chapters and over 2 million members.
In a break with NAWSA, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage in 1913 to pressure the federal government to take legislative action. One of their first acts was to organize a women's suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. The procession of more than 5,000 participants, the first of its kind, attracted a crowd of an estimated 500,000, as well as national media attention, but Wilson took no immediate action. In March 1917, the Congressional Union joined with Women's Party of Western Voters to form the National Woman's Party (NWP), whose aggressive tactics included staging more radical acts of civil disobedience and controversial demonstrations to draw more attention to the women's suffrage issue.
Ratification
Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul immediately mobilized members of the NAWSA and NWP to pressure states to ratify the amendment. Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan did so, their legislatures being in session. By July, Montana, Arkansas, and Nebraska had approved ratification. In other states support proved more difficult to secure. Much of the opposition to the amendment came from Southern Democrats; only one southern state (Texas) and four border states had voted for ratification. Alabama and Georgia were the first states to defeat ratification. The governor of Louisiana worked to organize 13 states to resist ratifying the amendment. The Maryland legislature refused to ratify the amendment and attempted to prevent other states from doing so. Carrie Catt began appealing to Western governors, encouraging them to act swiftly. By the end of 1919, a total of 22 states had ratified the amendment.
Resistance to ratification took many forms: anti-suffragists continued to state that the amendment would never be approved by the November, 1920 elections and that special sessions were a waste of time and effort. Other opponents to ratification filed lawsuits requiring the federal amendment to be approved by state referendums. By June, 1920, after intense lobbying by both the NAWSA and the NWP, the amendment was ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. Ratification would be determined by Tennessee. In the middle of July, 1919, both opponents and supporters of the Anthony Amendment arrived in Nashville to lobby the General Assembly. Carrie Catt, representing the NAWSA, worked with state suffragist leaders, including Anne Dallas Dudley and Abby Crawford Milton. Sue Shelton White, a Tennessee native who had participated in protests at the White House and toured with the Prison Special, represented the NWP.
Opposing them were the "Antis", in particular, Josephine Pearson, state president of the Southern Women's Rejection League of the Susan. B. Anthony Amendment, who had served as dean and chair of philosophy at Christian College in Columbia. Pearson was assisted by Anne Pleasant, president of the Louisiana Women's Rejection League and the wife of a former Louisiana governor. Especially in the South, the question of women's suffrage was closely tied to issues of race. While both white and African-American women worked toward women's suffrage, some white suffragists tried to appease southern states by arguing that votes for women could counter the black vote, strengthening white supremacy. For the anti-suffragists in the south (the "Antis"), the federal amendment was viewed as a "Force Bill", one that Congress could use to enforce voting provisions not only for women, but for African-American men who were still effectively disenfranchised even after passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Carrie Catt warned suffrage leaders in Tennessee that the "Anti-Suffs" would rely on "lies, innuendoes, and near truths", raising the issue of race as a powerful factor in their arguments.
Prior to the start of the General Assembly session on August 9, both supporters and opponents had lobbied members of the Tennessee Senate and House of Representatives. Though the Democratic governor of Tennessee, Albert H. Roberts, supported ratification, most lawmakers were still undecided. anti-suffragists targeted members, meeting their trains as they arrived in Nashville to make their case. When the General Assembly convened on August 9, both supporters and opponents set up stations outside of chambers, handing out yellow roses to suffrage supporters and red roses to the "Antis". On August 12, the legislature held hearings on the suffrage proposal; the next day the Senate voted 24-5 in favor of ratification. As the House prepared to take up the issue of ratification on August 18, lobbying intensified. House Speaker Seth M. Walker attempted to table the ratification resolution, but was defeated twice with a vote of 48-48. The vote on the resolution would be close. Representative Harry Burn, a Republican, had voted to table the resolution both times. When the vote was held again, Burn voted yes. The 24-year-old said he supported women's suffrage as a "moral right", but had voted against it because he believed his constituents opposed it. In the final minutes before the vote, he received a note from his mother, urging him to vote yes. Rumors immediately circulated that Burn and other lawmakers had been bribed, but newspaper reporters found no evidence of this.
The same day that ratification passed in the General Assembly, Speaker Walker filed a motion to reconsider. When it became clear that he did not have enough votes to carry the motion, representatives opposing suffrage boarded a train, fleeing Nashville for Decatur, Alabama to block the House from taking action on the reconsideration motion by preventing a quorum. Thirty-seven legislators fled to Decatur, issuing a statement that ratifying the amendment would violate their oath to defend the state constitution. The ploy failed. Speaker Walker was unable to muster any additional votes in the allotted time. When the House reconvened to take the final procedural steps that would reaffirm ratification, Tennessee suffragists seized an opportunity to taunt the missing Anti delegates by sitting at their empty desks. When ratification was finally confirmed, a suffragist on the floor of the House rang a miniature Liberty Bell.
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly approved the Nineteenth Amendment, with 50 of 99 members of the Tennessee House of Representatives voting yes. Upon signing the ratification certificate, the Governor of Tennessee sent it by registered mail to the U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, whose office received it at 4:00 a.m. on August 26, 1920. Once certified as correct, Colby signed the Proclamation of the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the presence of his secretary only, making the Nineteenth Amendment officially law as of that date. This provided the final ratification necessary to add the amendment to the Constitution, making the United States the twenty-seventh country in the world to give women the right to vote.
Women's Voting Behavior
Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million American women in time for the 1920 U.S. presidential election. Many legislators feared that a powerful women's bloc would emerge in American politics. This fear led to the passage of such laws as the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s. Newly enfranchised women and women's groups prioritized a reform agenda rather than party loyalty and their first goal was the Sheppard-Towner Act. It was the first federal social security law and made a dramatic difference before it was allowed to lapse in 1929. Other efforts at the federal level in the early 1920s that related to women labor and women's citizenship rights included the establishment of a Women's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor in 1920 and passage of the Cable Act in 1922. After the U.S. presidential election in 1924, politicians realized that the women's bloc they had feared did not actually exist and they did not need to cater to what they considered as "women's issues" after all. The eventual appearance of an American women's voting bloc has been tracked to various dates, depending on the source, from the 1950s to 1970. Around 1980, a nationwide gender gap in voting had emerged, with women usually favoring the Democratic candidate in presidential elections.
According to political scientists J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, few women turned out to vote in the first national elections after the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to do so. In 1920, 36 percent of eligible women turned out to vote (compared with 68 percent of men). The low turnout among women was partly due to other barriers to voting, such as literacy tests, long residency requirements and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept turnout low. The participation gap was lowest between men and women in swing states at the time, in states that had closer races such as Missouri and Kentucky, and where barriers to voting were lower. By 1960, women were turning out to vote in presidential elections in greater numbers than men and a trend of higher female voting engagement has continued into 2018.
Limitations
African-American women
African-Americans had gained the right to vote, but for 75 percent of them it was granted in name only, as state constitutional loopholes kept them from exercising that right. Prior to the passage of the amendment, southern politicians held firm in their convictions not to allow African-American women to vote. They had to fight to not only secure their own right to vote, but the right of African-American men as well.
Three million women south of the Mason-Dixon line remained disfranchised after the passage of the amendment. Election officials regularly obstructed access to the ballot box. As newly enfranchised African-American women attempted to register, officials increased methods of what Brent Staples, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, described as fraud, intimidation, poll taxes, and state violence. In 1926, a group of women attempting to register in Birmingham, Alabama were beaten by officials. Incidents such as this, threats of violence and job losses, and legalized prejudicial practices blocked women of color from voting. Not until the Twenty-fourth Amendment was adopted in 1962, were Congress and the states prohibited from making voting conditional on poll or other taxes, paving the way to more reforms with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
African-Americans continued to face barriers preventing them from exercising their vote until a new movement arose in the 1950s and 1960s, which posited voting rights as civil rights. Nearly a thousand civil rights workers converged on the South to support voting rights as part of Freedom Summer. However, state officials continued to refuse registration until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. For the first time, states were forbidden from imposing discriminatory restrictions on voting eligibility, and mechanisms were placed allowing the federal government to enforce its provisions.
Other minority groups
Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924, but state policies prohibited them from voting. In 1948, a suit brought by World War II veteran Miguel Trujillo resulted in Native Americans gaining the right to vote in New Mexico and Arizona, but some states continued to bar them from voting until 1957.
Poll taxes and literacy tests kept Latina women from voting. In Puerto Rico, for example, women did not receive the right to vote until 1929, but was limited to literate women until 1935. Further, the 1975 extensions of the Voting Rights Act included requiring bilingual ballots and voting materials in certain regions, making it easier for Latina women to vote.