NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Nineteenth Amendment was enacted in 1920, after a 70-year struggle led by the women's suffrage movement.

The groundwork for the suffrage movement was laid in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, now considered the birthplace of the women's movement. Here elizabeth cady stanton drafted the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which demanded voting rights, property rights, educational opportunities, and economic equity for women.

Rather than face the difficult task of obtaining approval of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution from an all-male Congress preoccupied with the question of slavery, the suffragists decided to focus their attention on the separate states and seek state constitutional amendments. The state-by-state effort began in 1867 in Kansas with a referendum to enfranchise women. The referendum was defeated, but that same year the western territories of Wyoming and Utah provided the first victories for the suffragists.

The movement then suffered a series of setbacks beginning in January 1878 when the voting rights amendment was first introduced in Congress. The full Senate did not consider the amendment until 1887 and voted to defeat the bill. The suffragists continued their state-by-state strategy and won a referendum ballot in Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.

The suffragists mounted a final and decisive drive in the second decade of the 1900s with victories in Washington in 1910 and California in 1911. The following year Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon gave women the right to vote, and in 1913 Illinois also passed measures supporting suffrage as did Montana and Nevada in 1914. Women in eleven states voted in the 1916 presidential election. By this time the United States was also involved in world war i, which brought national attention to the suffrage movement as well as to the important role women played in the war effort. During the war,

an unprecedented number of women joined the depleted industrial and public service workforce. Women became an active and visible population of the labor sector that benefited the national economy. By the end of 1918 four more states—Michigan, Oklahoma, New York, and South Dakota—had approved women's suffrage.

With the requisite two-thirds majority, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the amendment in January 1918. The vote was initially postponed, and the amendment was later defeated in October 1918 and again in February 1919. On June 4, 1919, almost 17 months after its introduction by the House of Representatives, the amendment was finally passed by the Senate. Having already considered and debated the voting rights issue for several years, the states ratified the amendment quickly. In August 1920 Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and last state necessary to ratify the enactment. With ratification complete, the Nineteenth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.

further readings

Brown, Jennifer K. 1993. "The Nineteenth Amendment and Women's Equality." Yale Law Journal 102 (June).

Clift, Eleanor. 2003. Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Hillyard, Carrie. 1996. "The History of Suffrage and Equal Rights Provisions in State Constitutions." BYU Journal of Public Law 10 (winter).

Lind, Joellen. 1994. "Dominance and Democracy: The Legacy of Woman Suffrage for the Voting Right." UCLA Women's Law Journal 5 (fall).

cross-references

Anthony, Susan Brownell; Equal Rights Amendment; Women's Rights.

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

Nineteenth Amendment. A women's suffrage amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1868. Ten years later, suffrage supporters proposed the so‐called Anthony Amendment, named for Susan B. Anthony, which was modeled after the Fifteenth Amendment. It provided that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” This was to become the language of section 1 of the Nineteenth Amendment, but forty‐two years were to go by before it became part of the Constitution.

Unsure of the prospects of a constitutional amendment, suffragists simultaneously resorted to litigation, with no success. Anthony was prosecuted for attempting to vote when she had no “lawful right” to do so (United States v. Anthony, 1873). Virginia Minor brought a civil suit in an attempt to enforce her right to vote in national elections as a privilege or immunity of national citizenship. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment did not confer the right to vote on women any more than it conferred such a right on children, the insane, or criminals (Minor v. Happersett, 1875). This result conformed to the Court's restrictive interpretation of the clause in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873.

Impelled by women's activism in the temperance, social work, and other reform crusades, and taking advantage of the changing social environment wrought by World War I, the suffragist movement succeeded in persuading Congress to enact the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. It was ratified on 18 August 1920.

See also Constitutional Amendments; Gender.

Nancy S. Erickson

NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

Proposed in Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified by the states August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gives women the right to vote. After four decades of struggle, the women's movement in the United States had finally secured the vote.

The woman's suffrage movement had its roots in the 1840s, when women who sought social reforms, including abolition of slavery, instituting a national policy of temperance (abstinence from alcoholic beverages), and securing better work opportunities and better pay, organized. These reformers soon realized that in order to effect change, they needed the power of the vote. An early leader of the suffragist movement was feminist and reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). She joined anti-slavery activist Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) to establish the first women's-rights convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1869 Stanton teamed with Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) to organize the National Woman Suffrage Association. That same year, another group was formed—the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by women's rights and anti-slavery activist Lucy Stone (1818–1893) and her husband Henry Brown Blackwell (1825–1909). In 1870 the common cause of the two groups was strengthened by the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave all men—regardless of race—the right to vote. When the two organizations joined forces in 1890, they formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The suffragists appealed to middle class and working class women alike, as well as to students and radicals. They waged campaigns at the state level, distributed literature, organized meetings, made speeches, marched in parades, picketed, lobbied in Washington, DC, and even chained themselves to the White House fence. If jailed, many resorted to hunger strikes.

From 1878 to 1917, woman suffrage amendments were introduced during every session of Congress; all failed. In 1918, the required support for the amendment was finally mustered in the House of Representatives—the result of years of activism and of the role women played during World War I (1914–1918). Having demonstrated their position as involved and intelligent citizens, members of the House passed the proposal in 1918. It then went to the Senate where it was defeated. Voting again the next year, the amendment passed in the Senate and was duly sent to the states, which ratified it in 1920. The amendment states that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

See also: Henry Brown Blackwell, Women's Movement