Congress Grants Vote: Women Win Suffrage

Seventy-one years of organizing, marching, lobbying, hunger strikes, and imprisonment came down to a Senate vote on June 4, 1919. The chamber approved the Nineteenth Amendment by 56 to 25, two votes more than the required two-thirds majority, and sent it to the states for ratification. The House had already passed it on May 21 by 304 to 89. The amendment’s language was blunt: "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." The women’s suffrage movement in America traced its formal origins to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott drafted a declaration demanding the vote. The movement fractured repeatedly over strategy, race, and pace. Some suffragists allied with abolitionists; others explicitly excluded Black women to court Southern support. The National American Woman Suffrage Association pursued state-by-state campaigns, winning the vote in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho by 1896. The more militant National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, picketed the White House and endured forced feeding in prison. World War I broke the political deadlock. Women’s contributions to the war effort made opposition to suffrage increasingly untenable. President Woodrow Wilson, who had long resisted the amendment, reversed his position in 1918 and urged Congress to pass it as a "war measure." Even so, the Senate defeated it twice before the 1918 midterm elections replaced enough opponents with supporters. Ratification required 36 of 48 states and took fourteen months. Tennessee became the deciding state on August 18, 1920, when 24-year-old legislator Harry Burn changed his vote after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to support suffrage. The amendment doubled the eligible electorate overnight, though poll taxes, literacy tests, and racial violence continued to deny the vote to most Black women in the South for another forty-five years.