CHAPTER
16

The Nineteenth Amendment: Women’s Suffrage

In This Chapter

• The Nineteenth Amendment
• The women’s movement
• Women win the vote
• Ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment

“The right of the 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 the power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.”

American woman were first allowed to vote less than a century ago. It was a long and difficult campaign spanning decades, and many of the leaders of the movement did not live to see the Nineteenth Amendment become part of the Constitution in 1920 and give them the right to vote.

The Birth of a Movement

Before independence, some of the colonies allowed women to vote, and some didn’t. During the Revolutionary War, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, insisting that the founding fathers should make room for some founding mothers, too. “If women are not represented in this new republic,” she warned, “there will be another revolution.” New Jersey allowed all its citizens to vote in 1776, as long as they had a certain amount of money, but the state took the vote away from women in 1807.

The attitude of the day among traditionalists who opposed women’s suffrage—both men and women—was summed up in a nineteenth-century Supreme Court case upholding an Illinois law that banned women from becoming lawyers. A concurring opinion in that case said in part: “It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”

Women were regarded by some as too flighty, or not smart enough, or too concerned with taking care of their homes and families. Suffragists were derided for abandoning their femininity, and a popular joke in the 1800s suggested that the best way to deal with demands for the women’s vote was to allow it for women over age 30. The problem would disappear, the joke went, because no woman wanted to admit to being over 30.

DEFINITION

Suffrage means the right to vote. During the long campaign to win the vote, most women preferred to be called suffragists, a neutral term that covered both men and women and the range of the political spectrum. The term suffragette, used by some newspapers and by opponents of the women’s vote, referred to women only and carried connotations of political and social radicalism.

Many point to the start of the women’s movement as the 2-day women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the convention concluded with a Declaration of Sentiments that objected to the unfair treatment of women politically, culturally, and economically. It also was the first large-scale public demand for women to have the vote.

Women promoted their cause through marches, letters, pamphlets and books, lobbying, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. But they did not always agree on tactics and strategy. For example, there was a debate within the early suffragist movement over whether to fight for equal suffrage (women having the same voting rights as men) or universal suffrage (equal voting rights for everyone, including women and racial minorities). Before the Civil War, the cause lagged in the South in part because many suffragists were also abolitionists. Some suffragists feared they might hurt their cause by linking it to voting rights for blacks, but it turned out that the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote decades before women got it.

Susan B. Anthony did not become active until she was in her 30s, in the 1850s, when she was bowled over by a speech given by suffragist leader Lucy Stone, the first woman in America to keep her own name after marriage. Anthony was swept up in the cause, and her tireless work soon made her one of the movement’s national leaders. She believed the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote and felt that if the right case came up, the Supreme Court would agree.

We the People

Lucy Stone attended Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the United States to admit women. It also was the first college in the United States to admit blacks.

In the autumn of 1872, Susan B. Anthony organized a group of women in her hometown of Rochester, New York, to register to vote in the upcoming presidential election. When election officials refused, she browbeat and intimidated them, threatening both criminal charges and lawsuits seeking damages, until they let her register. The day before the election, the local newspaper huffed, “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon.”

On November 5, shortly after the polls opened at the West End News Depot in Rochester, Susan B. Anthony voted. “Well I have been & gone & done it!” she exulted in a letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton as soon as she got home. Incidentally, she voted a straight Republican ticket—the party of Abraham Lincoln—largely because Republicans were generally more open than the Democratic Party to at least listening to the argument for women’s suffrage.

It was a Democratic poll watcher who filed the complaint that led to criminal charges against Anthony for illegal voting.

It took several days for reluctant local authorities to come to her home and arrest her, and once in custody, she refused bail. She figured that a writ of habeas corpus was the fast track to the Supreme Court. Her lawyer, however, posted her bail and tried to console the dismayed Anthony by saying he could not bear to see her behind bars.

After months of exhaustive speaking and writing, she finally came to trial in June 1873, facing up to 3 years in prison and a $500 fine. She wanted to take the stand, but the judge upheld a prosecution objection that she was not competent as a witness on her own behalf. As soon as the testimony was complete, the judge pulled a statement from his pocket that apparently had been written before the trial started. He ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give women the vote and that Anthony had voted illegally. He directed the jury to return a guilty verdict and then fined her $100. Anthony refused to pay the fine. The authorities could have pursued her and taken action to collect the fine or throw her in jail, but instead, they did nothing. With the case in legal limbo, Anthony was never able to appeal.

The Supreme Court did take up women’s suffrage the following year, in 1874, when a would-be voter named Virginia Minor sued a local election official in Missouri for refusing to let her register. Just as Anthony had envisioned, Minor based her appeal on the Fourteenth Amendment, on the grounds that denying women the vote abridges the privileges of citizenship. In its decision in the case, Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court conceded, “There is no doubt that women are citizens,” and that the Fourteenth Amendment aims to protect the privileges of all citizens.

However, in a long and sometimes meandering discussion of what it means to be a citizen, the high court finally concluded that voting is not one of the rights guaranteed to citizens by the Constitution: “The Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens.” Instead, the court said, it is up to the individual states to determine who can and cannot vote. If the framers had wanted women to have the right to vote, the court reasoned, they would have included that right in the original Constitution. If the right to vote was universal, the court asked, why was the Fifteenth Amendment needed to prevent the states from denying the right to vote because of race? The court held that women’s suffrage was a political issue and threw it back into the laps of the women themselves. “If the law is wrong, it ought to be changed,” the opinion said. “But the power for that is not with us.”

Winning the Vote

Susan B. Anthony, her close ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragist leaders developed a two-pronged attack, state and federal, seeking both an amendment to the U.S. Constitution and state-by-state changes in voting laws.

In 1875, Anthony drafted the wording of the amendment that was eventually approved. It was first introduced in Congress in 1878 and was introduced every session after that until it was ratified. The amendment never even made it out of committee, however, until 1887, when it was slapped down in the Senate by a vote of 34–16. The amendment did not make it back to the floor of either house for 27 years.

We the People

Although Susan B. Anthony gets more space in history books, and on dollar coins, her dear friend and colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton was equally influential in the suffragist movement. Stanton often preferred to stay home and take care of her seven children, but she was the writer who composed many of Anthony’s most stirring public utterances.

Publicly, members of Congress were concerned not only about whether women were suited to shoulder the responsibility of voting, but also about the changes women voters might bring about. For instance, women were known to be concerned—maybe overly concerned—about health, safety, education, and working conditions, especially for child labor. Newspapers fulminated about the impact an 8-hour workday for women would have on industries such as canning and millinery and bemoaned that restrictions on night work for women would backfire by putting “elevator girls” and theater ticket-takers out of work.

Privately, the men serving in Congress did not want to change the formula that got them into office and kept them there. They knew how to campaign for men’s votes. If they gave women the vote, they’d risk reelection even if they changed the way they campaigned. The reaction in Congress was similar when the Seventeenth Amendment was proposed to provide for the direct election of senators. It took a national groundswell of public opinion to get the amendment through Congress, and in the late 1800s, there was no national groundswell for women’s suffrage.

There were local and regional groundswells, though, and the suffragists made better progress trying to change state laws. Wyoming granted women suffrage as a territory, and in 1890, when it became a state, it was the first state where women could vote equally with men. Other Western states followed, including Colorado in 1893, Utah in 1895, and Idaho in 1896.

In 1890, two of the leading suffragist organizations merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but the movement seemed to sag around the turn of the century as its longtime leaders faded from the scene. Lucretia Mott died in 1880, Lucy Stone in 1893, Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902, and Susan B. Anthony in 1906. The cause was soon reinvigorated, however, in part by a surprise victory in Washington State in 1910 and another narrow victory in California the following year. By 1912, women could vote in nine Western states, and momentum was building across the country.

In 1913, one of the new generation of suffragist leaders, Alice Paul, led a march of several thousand women through Washington on President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration day. More than 250,000 spectators lined the parade route, not all of them friendly. Marchers were harassed and skirmished with taunting onlookers, and dozens of women were hospitalized with injuries. More marches and demonstrations followed. A group of women drove—they actually drove the cars themselves, which was unusual at that time—cross-country gathering signatures and presented a petition for women’s suffrage to the White House signed by half a million people. In 1916, women voted for president in 11 states, and suffragist leaders claimed women were responsible for reelecting President Wilson. The president did not disagree even though he opposed women’s suffrage.

In 1917, for Wilson’s second inaugural, Alice Paul led another march, this time around the White House. That same year, New York gave women the right to vote and Montana elected Jeannette Rankin the first female congresswoman. The suffragist marches, demonstrations, speeches, and lobbying intensified, and a group of women took up positions outside the White House, vowing to stand as silent sentinels until they had the right to vote. In the states, women stepped up their campaigns, working to elect prosuffragist men running against congressmen and state lawmakers who opposed women’s right to vote.

We the People

After losing a Senate race in 1919, largely because she had voted against the United States entering World War I, Jeannette Rankin had a long career as a social activist before again winning election to Congress in 1940. The following year, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan. She did not run for reelection.

Ratification

Looking ahead to the 1920 elections, at least 15 states were going to allow women to vote in all races, and women would be voting for president in at least 15 other states. President Wilson changed his position and spoke ardently in favor of granting women the right to vote via the proposed Nineteenth Amendment.

The proposed amendment passed the House by the necessary two thirds by a single vote in 1918 but fell two votes short in the Senate later that year and one vote short when the Senate took it up again in early 1919. In May 1919, the amendment was approved in the House by 14 votes more than needed. It came up for a vote in the Senate for a fifth time, and the third time in less than a year, all unsuccessful. A senator from Alabama proposed that the amendment be considered by state constitutional conventions rather than the state legislatures, but that also was defeated. So was a proposal by a Louisiana senator to change the amendment so it would be enforced by the states individually rather than by the federal government.

The Senate approved the amendment by a vote of 56–25, which was 2 more than necessary to send the amendment to the states for ratification. When the vote was announced, the suffragists thronged in the galleries “broke into deafening applause,” newspapers reported. “For two minutes the demonstration went on ….”

Arizona became the forty-eighth state in 1912, so 36 states needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. Nine Southern states were vehemently opposed, so suffragists needed ratification from all but 3 of the other 39 states. Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first to ratify, and 32 other states followed in the ensuing months.

By August 1920, only one more state was needed. The vote was coming up in Tennessee, but it appeared that the amendment was going to fall a single vote short of ratification in the state legislature. Then a lawmaker named Harry Burn, only 24 and until then an outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage, changed his vote. Tennessee ratified the amendment, and the results were certified in Washington a few days later, on August 26, which is why that date is celebrated as Women’s Equality Day by presidential proclamation in the United States every year. After he cast his vote, according to the story, Burn revealed a note he had been carrying in his pocket. “Don’t forget to be a good boy,” the note read. “Vote for suffrage.” It was from his mother.

A case came before the Supreme Court in 1922, Leser v. Garnett, that challenged the Nineteenth Amendment, but the justices dismissed it quickly, briefly, and unanimously.

We the People

Charlotte Woodward, only 19 when she attended the convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, was the sole surviving signer of the Declaration of Sentiments when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Many historical references today assume she voted at age 91 in the 1920 election, but government archives say she stayed home ill that day and died before she ever actually cast a ballot.