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."