Roaring Twenties

The History of the 19th Amendment: A 72-Year Fight

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, was the largest single expansion of the American electorate in the country’s history. It prohibited the denial of the vote “on account of sex” and added roughly 27 million women to the voting rolls. It was the culmination of a 72-year fight that had begun at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and was led, in its final phase, by two competing organizations: the NAWSA and the more militant National Woman’s Party. The story of the leading figures is told in Leading Suffragists: The Women Who Won the Vote; the impact of the vote in 1920 is in The Impact of the Women’s Vote in the 1920 Election.

The Early Movement: Seneca Falls to the Civil War

The campaign for women’s suffrage began, in symbolic terms, with the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. American women delegates, including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were denied seats at the convention because of their sex. The two women spent the next several days walking the streets of London and talking about the need for a women’s rights movement.

Eight years later, on July 19–20, 1848, they organized the Seneca Falls Convention in the small upstate New York town of Seneca Falls. About 100 people attended, mostly women but also some men, including the African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, that listed the grievances of women and called for the vote.

The Seneca Falls Convention was widely ridiculed. The New York Herald ran a satirical editorial calling the delegates “strong-minded” women. But the convention launched a movement that would last the rest of the century. The first women’s rights newspapers — The Lily, The Una — were founded in the 1850s.

The Split: 1869 to 1890

The Civil War interrupted the suffrage movement. After the war, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) introduced the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time, and the Fifteenth 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 Fifteenth Amendment. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony argued that women should be included; Lucy Stone and her allies were willing to support the Fifteenth Amendment as written. In 1869, the two factions organized separately. Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Stone, with her husband Henry Blackwell, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

The two organizations competed for two decades. The NWSA was more committed to a federal constitutional amendment. The AWSA was more focused on state-level campaigns.

In 1890, the two organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton as its first president. The merger was brokered by Frances Willard, the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The merged organization was the principal vehicle for suffrage in the United States for the next three decades.

The Western States Lead the Way

The American West was the first to grant women the right to vote. Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, partly to attract settlers. Congress finally acquiesced when Wyoming sought statehood in 1890.

The other western states followed. Utah in 1870 (and lost it under the Edmunds Act of 1882 before regaining it in 1896). Colorado in 1893. Idaho in 1896. Washington in 1910. California in 1911. Arizona, Oregon, Kansas in 1912. Nevada, Montana in 1914. New York in 1917. Michigan, Oklahoma, South Dakota in 1918.

By the time the Nineteenth Amendment was sent to the states in June 1919, 15 states had already given women the vote. The western states’ lead provided a model that helped neutralize the most common anti-suffrage argument — that women voters would be a disaster for the family.

The Final Push: 1915 to 1920

By 1910, the suffrage movement had split again. The mainstream NAWSA, under Carrie Chapman Catt from 1915, pursued a careful, state-by-state campaign known as the “Winning Plan” — pick the states most likely to ratify, push, and add them to the total. Catt was a brilliant organizer who built NAWSA into a sophisticated national pressure group.

The second wing, the National Woman’s Party (NWP), was more militant. Founded in 1916 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the NWP modeled itself on the Pankhursts and the British Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). In March 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, Paul organized a suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. The parade was attacked by a hostile crowd; police did not intervene.

The NWP then organized pickets at the White House, beginning in January 1917. The picketers — the “Silent Sentinels” — held banners denouncing Wilson as “Kaiser Wilson.” The Wilson administration responded by arresting the picketers. Many were jailed; some, including Lucy Burns, were force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. The “Night of Terror” of November 14, 1917 became a turning point. The leading suffragists are profiled in Leading Suffragists: The Women Who Won the Vote.

The U.S. entry into World War I in April 1917 changed the political calculus. Wilson, a reluctant convert, addressed the Senate in September 1918. The House passed the amendment in January 1918; the Senate finally approved it on June 4, 1919.

The Ratification: 1920

The amendment then went to the states. The first three states to ratify — Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan — did so on June 10, 1919. By the spring of 1920, 35 states had ratified. Only one more was needed.

The decisive moment came in Tennessee. The state legislature was tied 48–48 in the House on the ratification vote. 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, Febb Ensminger Burn, urging him to “be a good boy” and support women’s suffrage. With Burn’s vote, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify.

The certification of the ratification was signed by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby on August 26, 1920. The date is celebrated today as Women’s Equality Day. The amendment’s adoption in 1920 gave the vote to roughly 27 million American women. The first presidential election in which they could vote was the 1920 contest between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox of Ohio. The story of that first election is in The Impact of the Women’s Vote in the 1920 Election.

The 1920 election is also a critical event of the decade more broadly, discussed in the broader 1920s timeline.

A Movement with Deep Cultural Roots

The 72-year suffrage fight was, in many ways, the precursor to the civil rights movement of the twentieth century: a sustained, mostly non-violent campaign to extend the promise of the Constitution to a group that had been excluded from it. It produced, as a by-product, the flapper of the 1920s and the New Woman of the 1910s — figures who, like the suffragists, insisted on women’s autonomy. The cultural and political revolutions were inseparable.

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