History of the 19th Amendment: Women’s Right to Vote, 106 Years Ago
1912 Ohio Woman Suffrage Headquarters. Image: Wikipedia
HISTORY OF THE 19TH AMENDMENT: WOMEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE
Over a hundred years ago, on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was adopted.
This prohibited the federal and state governments from denying citizens of the United States the right to vote on the basis of sex. Effectively, this meant that the right to vote could no longer be denied to women.
The text, in part, read:
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.
For over 70 years before that, the women’s movement had been pressing for the legal right of women to vote, going back to the 1848 women’s rights Seneca Falls Convention, “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Two years later, the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850 saw suffrage, the right to vote, as an essential part of the movement.
In 1869, the Women’s Movement coalesced around two different organizations.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) and Susan B Anthony. Image: Wikipedia
In 1860, Susan B. Anthony led the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
- The other was led by Lucy Stone, who helped organize the earlier National Women’s Rights Convention and influenced leaders Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
These two groups combined in 1873 to form the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which campaigned for women’s suffrage and a “sober and pure world” achieved through “abstinence, purity, and evangelical Christianity.”
This had a powerful impact on the passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited alcohol in the U.S. in 1919.
Feminism and the 19th Amendment
50th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage in the United States, 5th Avenue, New York, New York, August 26, 1970. (Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images)
Looking back on the history of the women’s movement through the lens of feminism, the original “suffrage” campaign is identified as First-wave feminism. This is to distinguish it from Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, commonly called “Women’s Liberation,” when the priority was equal legal and social rights.
During this Second-wave period, feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Up to that time, it was uncommon to use the word “gender” to refer to anything other than grammatical categories, meaning a specific form of a “noun class” system in which nouns are assigned to gender categories, such as masculine, feminine, or neuter noun genders.
Third-wave feminism, starting in the 1990s, can be considered both a continuation of and a reaction to Second-wave feminism. This most recent wave focused on the perceived failures of the Second Wave while responding to the backlash against it. Using what is now called modernist “critical theory,” a late 20th-century social-philosophical ideology that emerged from the U.S. “critical legal studies” of the late 1970s, it emphasized “intersectional” issues affecting race and gender.
Some have argued for the existence of Fourth-wave feminism starting around 2012, which has leveraged social media for online activism to combat sexual harassment and violence against women; it is best known for the #MeToo movement.
19th Amendment and African-American Women’s Suffrage
Mary Church Terrell. Image: Wikipedia
Contemporaneously with the mid-19th-century suffrage efforts, notable African-American suffragists, including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were also at work. Terrell was among the first African-American women to earn a college degree and championed suffrage and civil rights.
She helped form the Colored Women’s League of Washington (1849) and the National Association of Colored Women (1896). She was a founding member of the later National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, with 8,000 other women, participated in the 1913 Woman Suffrage March in Washington, DC. An African-American journalist, she was an outspoken leader in the anti-lynching campaigns of the late 1800s and the founder of the later Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913.
It’s essential to note that these efforts ultimately led to the passage of the 19th Amendment; however, it did not secure the right to vote for African American women. While the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 stated that voting rights could not be:
“denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
It nevertheless allowed the States to determine the specific qualifications for voting. Some states, especially in the South, used qualifications such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and other practices to disenfranchise African-American voters in the decades following the passage of the 15th Amendment through so-called “Jim Crow” laws.
Other Voting Milestones beyond the 19th Amendment
President Lyndon B. Johnson celebrates with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Clarence Mitchell after signing the Voting Rights bill into law on August 6, 1965. Image: Wikipedia
In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to all Native Americans, regardless of their tribal affiliation, and conferred the right to vote. But while about two-thirds of Native Americans were already citizens, some western states continued to bar them from voting until 1948.
In 1943, the Magnuson Act gave Chinese immigrants the right to citizenship and the right to vote. In 1948, Arizona and New Mexico became the last states to extend full voting rights to Native Americans.
It was not until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that the “Voting Rights Act” of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, banned literacy tests and other disenfranchising methods. The U.S. Supreme Court case Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections declared poll taxes unconstitutional.
The path to equal voting rights involved a long series of threads, including women’s rights, abolition, temperance, and civil rights.
Women’s Equality Day Infographic, by Tammie McClure. Image: infographicsmania
In recent years, August 26 has been recognized as “Women’s Equality Day,” with a focus on issues of equal pay for women and female minorities.
Might the 19th Amendment be Repealed?
Repeal the 19th. Image: Suffrage and the Media
There have been efforts to overturn the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote in the United States.
Q: How likely is this to happen?
A: Incredibly unlikely.
Why? There are at least three reasons.
Overturning a Constitutional Amendment is Difficult
The issue is not moral or political, but a simple matter of civics. An amendment cannot be overturned by a simple act of Congress or a Supreme Court ruling. It requires a new amendment to the Constitution. According to Article V of the Constitution, this requires:
- Proposal: A two-thirds vote in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, or a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.
- Ratification: Approval by three-fourths (38 out of 50) of the State legislatures, or by conventions in three-fourths of the States.
Amendment Repeal Has Only Ever Happened Once
The 21st Amendment is the only instance in U.S. history in which a constitutional amendment was passed specifically to repeal a previous one: the 18th Amendment, which had established a nationwide prohibition on alcohol. By 1933, prohibition had become unpopular.
Passing any New Amendment is a Long Process
The last time the U.S. had a new Constitutional Amendment was on May 7, 1992, with the ratification of the 27th Amendment, which prohibits any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of Congress from taking effect until after the next election of the House of Representatives.
But it took 202 years to ratify because the original 1798 proposal included no time limit for ratification. The ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), which was reintroduced to Congress in 1971, failed because it did not secure approval from 38 states by the established deadline of 1982.
Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com
