Roaring Twenties

Women’s Suffrage and the 19th Amendment

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on August 18, 1920, prohibited the denial of the right to vote “on account of sex.” It was the largest single expansion of the American electorate in the country’s history, and it was the culmination of a 72-year political struggle that had begun with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. The amendment was the first major political reform of the 1920s, and it shaped every presidential election in the decade and beyond.

A 72-Year Fight

The campaign for women’s suffrage was one of the longest, most carefully organized political movements in American history. It was, in many ways, the precursor to the civil rights movement of the twentieth century: a sustained, mostly non-violent, deliberately disciplined, often long-suffering campaign to extend the promise of the Constitution to a group that had been excluded from it.

The Seneca Falls Convention of July 19–20, 1848, in the small upstate New York town of Seneca Falls, is the symbolic beginning. It was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother and former seminary student, and Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, both of whom had been denied seats at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London because of their sex. About 100 people attended, mostly women but also some men, including the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who gave a famous speech in support of women’s voting rights.

The convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that listed the grievances of women and called for the vote. It was a radical document, even by the standards of 1848, and it was widely ridiculed at the time. The New York Herald ran a satirical editorial, “The Woman’s Rights Convention,” calling the delegates “strong-minded” women who should “stick to the distaff.”

The Civil War interrupted the suffrage movement, as it did so much else. The 14th Amendment (1868) introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time, which Suffragists fought to remove. The 15th Amendment (1870) prohibited the denial of the vote on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” — but said nothing about sex. Suffragists split over whether to support the 15th Amendment. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argued that women should be included; the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, was willing to support the 15th Amendment as written. The two organizations split for two decades, reuniting in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) with Anthony as its president.

The American West was the first to grant women the vote. Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote in 1869, partly to attract settlers. Colorado followed in 1893, Utah in 1896, Idaho in 1896, Washington in 1910, California in 1911, Arizona in 1912, Oregon in 1912, Montana in 1914, and Nevada in 1914. By 1917, about 20 states had given women the right to vote in at least some elections.

The Two Suffrage Wings

By 1910, the suffrage movement had split again, into two competing wings. The first, the NAWSA under Anna Howard Shaw and, from 1915, Carrie Chapman Catt, was the mainstream organization. Catt’s “Winning Plan” was a careful, state-by-state campaign: pick the states most likely to ratify, push, and add them to the total. The NAWSA was cautious, professional, and willing to work with the political parties.

The second wing, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) under Alice Paul, was more militant. Paul had worked with the British suffragettes, who used hunger strikes and public demonstrations to force the issue in Britain. After returning to the United States in 1913, Paul organized a parade in Washington, D.C., on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The parade was disrupted by a hostile crowd; police did not intervene. The episode made Paul and the NWP national news.

The NWP then organized pickets at the White House, beginning in January 1917. The picketers — known as the “Silent Sentinels” — held banners denouncing Wilson as “Kaiser Wilson” and calling attention to the war in Europe, which the United States had not yet entered. The Wilson administration responded by arresting the picketers for “obstructing traffic.” Many were jailed; some, including Lucy Burns, were force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. The NWP’s tactics were controversial, even within the suffrage movement, but they kept the issue in the headlines.

The War and the Final Push

The U.S. entry into World War I in April 1917 changed the political calculus. Suffragists argued that women, who were filling the factories and farms left empty by the men who had gone to war, deserved the vote. Wilson, a reluctant convert, addressed the Senate in September 1918 and called for the swift passage of a suffrage amendment. The House had already passed a version of what would become the Nineteenth Amendment in January 1918; the Senate finally approved it on June 4, 1919.

The amendment then went to the states. By the time it was sent out, 15 states had already granted women the right to vote, but the campaign for ratification was hard. The most decisive moment came in Tennessee in the summer of 1920. The state legislature was tied 48–48 in the House on the ratification vote, and the result depended on a single representative: a 24-year-old named Harry T. Burn, who had been instructed by the county chairman of his party to vote against ratification. On August 18, 1920, Burn voted “aye” — a vote he later explained by pointing to a letter from his mother urging him to “be a good boy” and support women’s suffrage. With Burn’s vote, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, the threshold required by the amendment.

The First Women Voters

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which women could vote nationwide. About 27 million women were newly eligible. The candidates were the Republican Warren G. Harding and the Democrat James M. Cox of Ohio. The issue of women’s suffrage had been settled by the time of the campaign, but the way women voted was a major question.

The answer was surprising. Women did not vote as a unified bloc. The “gender gap” that we associate with American politics — the tendency of women to vote for Democratic candidates — did not appear in 1920. In fact, the first studies of women’s voting behavior suggested that they voted in much the same way as their husbands. The results disappointed many suffragists, who had expected that women voters would support the Prohibition and the League of Nations, two of the major reform issues of the era. In fact, women voters were as diverse as the rest of the electorate. A detailed look at the impact of the women’s vote in 1920 is in the third long-tail page.

Black Women and the Vote

The Nineteenth Amendment, in practice, did not enfranchise all women. In the South, African American women were subject to the same restrictions as African American men: poll taxes, literacy tests, the white primary, and outright intimidation at the polls. The amendment, on paper, ended the denial of the vote “on account of sex,” but in practice the Jim Crow system continued to disenfranchise most Black voters, men and women alike, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The National Association of Colored Women (NACW), led by Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, had supported suffrage, but the NAACP and the NACW both noted that the Nineteenth Amendment was incomplete. The work of enfranchising Black women — and Black men — would take another 45 years.

The Anti-Suffragists

The fight for women’s suffrage was opposed by a substantial, well-organized, and well-funded anti-suffrage movement. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was founded in 1911 and led, for most of its history, by Josephine Dodge. Its members included many prominent women, including Almena P. Loya, Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge, and the former First Lady Mrs. Benjamin Harrison.

The anti-suffragists made a series of arguments. They said that women were morally superior to men and that politics would corrupt them. They said that women already had influence in their homes and that the separate spheres of men and women were natural and just. They said that the vote would impose an additional burden on women, who were already overworked. They said that most women did not want the vote.

The liquor industry was a major funder of the anti-suffrage movement. It feared — correctly — that the women’s vote would lead to national Prohibition, and it spent tens of thousands of dollars opposing women’s suffrage in the 1910s. The Southern textile industry also opposed the amendment, fearing that women would support labor reform. The Roman Catholic Church did not officially oppose suffrage, but many Catholic women and men were skeptical.

The Disappointing Election

The 1920 election was, for many suffragists, a disappointment. Harding won in a landslide, taking 60 percent of the popular vote. Cox lost badly, even in his home state. The Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs, ran from prison, where he was serving a sentence for opposing the war. Debs received about 3 percent of the vote, but he had been the candidate of hope for many women and men in 1912.

The disappointment of the 1920 election led many suffragists to conclude that the vote was only the beginning. In 1923, Alice Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have guaranteed equal legal rights for men and women. The NWP and the National Women’s Party continued to lobby for the ERA for the next 50 years. The National Woman’s Party also lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s, but it was not ratified.

What the 19th Amendment Changed — and What It Didn’t

The Nineteenth Amendment is the most important single change in American voting law since the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870. It doubled the size of the electorate, transformed the politics of every state, and created the conditions for the New Deal coalition of the 1930s. It also created new problems — the gender gap in voting, the gender divide in policy preferences, the persistent underrepresentation of women in office — that have not been fully resolved.

The amendment is also, in retrospect, a marker of the end of the first wave of feminism and the beginning of a long pause. The second wave would not begin until the 1960s. The 1920s were a period in which the new women voters were integrated into the political system, in which the flapper of the 1920s and the New Woman of the 1910s were both absorbed into the mass consumer culture, and in which the suffrage movement lost its organizational coherence. Many of the leaders of the movement — Stanton, Anthony, Paul, Catt, Wells-Barnett, Terrell — are now remembered as founding figures of American democracy. The details of their lives are in the leading suffragists long-tail page.

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