Women Vote Secured: Supreme Court Upholds 19th Amendment

The Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified for eighteen months, but opponents refused to accept that women could vote. Maryland legislators challenged the amendment's validity all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that it exceeded Congress's constitutional authority and that Maryland's refusal to ratify should exempt the state from compliance. On February 27, 1922, the Court unanimously dismissed every argument in Leser v. Garnett, cementing women's suffrage as permanent constitutional law. The case was brought by Oscar Leser, a Maryland citizen who challenged the registration of two women voters in Baltimore. His lawyers deployed three lines of attack: that the amendment was so sweeping it effectively destroyed state sovereignty and therefore required ratification by state conventions rather than legislatures; that several ratifying states had violated their own procedures; and that Tennessee and West Virginia's ratifications were invalid because their legislatures had previously rejected the amendment. Each argument was a desperate attempt to find a procedural loophole that would unravel the amendment. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote the opinion for a unanimous Court, dispatching each claim with crisp efficiency. The Fifteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights regardless of race, had been ratified through the same process and had long been accepted as valid — the Nineteenth Amendment was no different. State procedural irregularities were matters for the states to resolve, not grounds for federal courts to overturn a constitutional amendment. The official notification of ratification by the Secretary of State was conclusive. The ruling closed the last legal door through which opponents could challenge women's right to vote. The broader struggle, however, was far from over. Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other mechanisms to disenfranchise Black women for decades after the amendment's ratification. Full enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment's promise would require the Voting Rights Act of 1965, forty-three years after the Supreme Court declared the law of the land settled in a case that history has largely forgotten.