Women's Suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment

My great-grandmother Leta was born into the Women’s Suffrage movement. By 1894, the year of her birth, American heroes Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were, whether they knew it or not, close to achieving their goal.

These women began their cry for voting equality shortly before the Civil War, and upon its conclusion had sufficient opportunity to increase their visibility and viability in response to the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave black men the right to vote. That Amendment passed and was ratified in 1869, although women were still excluded.

According to Wikipedia, voting rights for women in the U.S.A. began in the colonies when a woman named Lydia Taft was granted this right by the town meeting of Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1756 upon the death of her husband and eldest son. Actually, New Jersey was the first state to allow women property owners to vote in 1790, but that right was rescinded in 1807.

It wasn’t until June 1848, when Mr. Gerrit Smith made woman suffrage a plank in the Liberty Party platform that the movement truly commenced. That July, at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott began the seventy-year struggle by women to secure the right to vote. Notable events include an 1850 National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts organized by Lucy Stone. Reading Stone’s speech ignited Susan B. Anthony, who joined in 1852 and would be historically considered the primary figure of the push for equality in voting. A conflict over the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment (which gave men only the right to vote regardless of their race) arose as some of the women followed a male Republican leader and Frederick Douglass to support it while Anthony and Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to oppose it, since it didn’t include women, unfairly earning the moniker of “racists” in the process.

“In 1890, however (over twenty years later),” Wikipedia reports, “the two groups united to form one national organization known as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).” Not incidentally, the right to vote was part of a broader movement for women, who in the United States could not own property or keep their own wages, or in some cases, file for divorce.

 “A significant portion of the opposition to women's suffrage in late 19th-century American circles arose from the fear—which was not without justification—that women would use their vote to enact prohibition of alcoholic beverages,” notes Wikipedia. (I wonder a little if the Temperance Movement didn’t, at least, temporarily shanghai the movement for equal voting rights for women a bit. Both movements did progress concurrently in the early 20^th century. The Amendment for Prohibition was ratified on January 16, 1919.)

Women simultaneously pursued their right to vote both nationally and at the state level with several successes, including Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington and California. In fact, “Clara Elizabeth Chan Lee (October 21, 1886 – October 5, 1993) was the first Chinese American woman voter in the United States. She registered to vote on November 8, 1911 in California.”

According to Wikipedia, “World War I provided the final push for women's suffrage in America. After President Woodrow Wilson announced that World War I was a war for democracy, women were up in arms. Members of the NWP held up banners saying that the United States was not a democracy. Women in the audience of his public speeches began to ask the question, ‘Mr. President, if you sincerely desire to forward the interests of all the people, why do you oppose the national enfranchisement of women?’ On January 1918 the President acceded to the women who had been protesting at his public speeches and made a pro-suffrage speech.”

While, Anthony and Cady Stanton drafted a Constitutional Amendment and first introduced it in 1878, it wasn’t until January 12, 1915 that a suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but was defeated by a vote of 204 to 174. Another bill was brought before the House on January 10, 1918. This time, President Wilson made a strong and widely published appeal to pass the bill, and it was passed by two-thirds of the House, with only one vote to spare, but fell two votes short of passage in the Senate. On February 10, 1919, it was again voted upon, and then it was lost by only one vote.

In a special session of Congress called by President Wilson on May 21, 1919, the Amendment finally passed with 42 votes more than necessary. On June 4, 1919, it passed in the Senate with 56 ayes and 25 nays. Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures by March 1920. However, it wasn’t until August 18, 1920, when Tennessee narrowly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it law throughout the country.

The Amendment states: “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.”