On this day in 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, ensuring that the amendment guaranteeing a woman’s right to vote would be adopted into the U.S. Constitution. The 19th Amendment’s ratification was made possible by a long line of advocates dating back to the Founding.
In March 1776, Abigail Adams famously wrote to her husband, John Adams, with her hopes for the new legal system that would govern America after its forthcoming independence from British rule.
She wrote, “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.”
The “Rebellion” that Abigail Adams foresaw came to a head in 1848 during the Seneca Falls Convention. The event is regarded as the birthplace of organized American feminism, when the assembly at the Convention ratified Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments. The document, paralleling the Declaration of Independence, declared that “all men and women are created equal” and listed the “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” The lack of suffrage was listed first amongst the grievances, although some at the convention, including Stanton’s husband, disagreed with the notion entirely.
The convention was also notable in that it excluded black women and women of other minority populations. Exclusion was a prominent facet of the new suffrage movement, which seemed at times to view suffrage as a zero-sum game between oppressed populations.
In an 1866 meeting where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony argued about whether to prioritize suffrage for black men or suffrage for white women, Anthony said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
Black women remained largely excluded from suffrage discussions as seen in Sojourner Truth’s 1867 comment on the issue: “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
In 1870 the 15th Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing that the right to vote could not be impeded by “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Absent was any protection based on one’s sex. This left the members of the American Equal Rights Association, America’s foremost equal suffrage group, divided and frustrated, eventually leading to the group’s fracture into competing advocacy groups.
One of these groups, the National Woman Suffrage Association, attempted to use the newly ratified 14th Amendment as a litigation strategy for their cause. As part of this strategy, Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election of 1872 and was subsequently arrested for violating the federal law proscribing voting for those not lawfully given the right.
In the ensuing case, United States v. Anthony, Anthony argued that the criminal statute violated the 14th Amendment, which provided that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” The court found against Anthony, ruling that “[t]he right of voting, or the privilege of voting, is a right or privilege arising under the constitution of the state, and not under the constitution of the United States.” Later, in 1875, the case of Minor v. Happersett went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which similarly ruled that suffrage was not a right of U.S. citizenship.
Despite the failure of new legal arguments based on the Reconstruction amendments, different groups on the western frontier were succeeding at the territorial level. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory ratified the first-ever constitution including a woman’s right to vote. The Utah Territory allowed women the right to vote in 1870 and became the first territory to hold elections where women actually voted.
In 1890, when Wyoming was applying for statehood, Congress appeared ready to stall its application over women’s suffrage. The Wyoming legislature responded saying, “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.” By the end of the 19th century, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho had all become states that protected a woman’s right to vote.
Around this same time, some of the separate suffragist groups reunified as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). However, they still excluded black women from their ranks. This division led Ida B. Wells to help found one of the first and most important black suffragist groups, the Alpha Suffrage Club, in Chicago in 1913. The group aimed to provide black women with the voice they were denied by their exclusion from the other groups.
In 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in Washington, D.C., Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organized a parade promoting women's suffrage. The parade drew over 5,000 women and brought the issue to the front of the national news.
Paul and Burns formed the Congressional Union, later the National Woman’s Party, a group whose mission was to get Congress to pass a women’s voting bill. They unsuccessfully tried in the 1916 elections to leverage the voting power of women in western states that already had female enfranchisement.
In 1919, the U.S. Congress was finally able to pass the 19th Amendment, and by August 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment – one short of it being adopted into the Constitution. The final vote came from Tennessee, which narrowly passed the amendment in their statehouse by a vote of 49-47. The decisive vote was cast by 24-year old Harry Burn, who had intended to vote against it until he received his mother’s letter urging him to “be a good boy” and vote for ratification.
The 19th Amendment was added to the Constitution, ensuring that American citizens could no longer be denied the right to vote because of their sex.
Michael Boyd was a legal studies intern at the National Constitution Center.
