Nineteenth Amendment

Nineteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment inscribed women's right to vote into the U.S. Constitution. No other constitutional amendment required such a long, hard‐fought struggle.The woman suffrage movement, launched by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, was initially understood to involve a state‐by‐state process. After the Civil War, in response to the constitutional amendments that granted citizenship to former slaves and established suffrage rights “regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude,” woman suffragists shifted their sights to the federal Constitution. A woman‐suffrage amendment was introduced in 1878 by Senator Aaron Sargent of California, but for the next thirty‐five years suffrage efforts focused on the state level.

In 1913, however, a new, more concerted drive for a federal amendment was initiated by Alice Paul, a charismatic young woman from Pennsylvania. Paul's followers, first known as the Congressional Union and then as the National Woman's party, forthrightly challenged Congress and the president to support the amendment; they were soon joined by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, a larger and more moderate group, under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt. In 1918 (with President Woodrow Wilson, praising women's contributions to the war effort, finally endorsing the cause), these combined forces won House passage of the amendment; eighteen months later the Senate, less amenable to public pressure, passed the measure. Ratification proved difficult because Democrats from the South, where most blacks were excluded from the franchise, opposed an assertion of federal control over suffrage. After sixteen months, however, the border state of Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, bringing the seventy‐two‐year effort for woman suffrage to a successful conclusion.
See also Anthony, Susan B.; Feminism; League of Women Voters; Progressive Era; Women's Rights Movements; World War I.

Bibliography

Christine A. Lunardi , From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party, 1910–1928, 1986.
Eleanor Flexner with and Ellen Fitzpatrick , Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enlarged ed., 1996.

Ellen C. DuBois