Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

About the Author

Defining exactly who authored the Nineteenth Amendment is somewhat difficult. Susan B. Anthony is generally credited for its initial submission to Congress through her friend and sympathizer Aaron Sargent. After its first reading it became known as the Anthony Amendment in her honor. The amendment, itself, however, is a rewording of the earlier Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed universal male suffrage. Anthony, Stanton, and other leaders of the NWSA contributed to the cause.

Susan Brownell Anthony was born to Quaker parents, Daniel and Lucy, in Adams, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1820. Honoring the Quaker sensitivity for gender equality, her parents provided all of their children, male and female, an advanced education at a private Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia. There Anthony trained as a teacher and acquired her lifelong zeal for activism and reform. When Anthony's family relocated to Rochester, New York, in 1845, they continued to engage in a broad range of reform movements, including abolition, temperance, education, labor, and women's rights. Both of her parents and her sister Mary signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848. It was through this connection that Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and attended her first women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852. Anthony became involved in work for women's rights through her engagement in the temperance movement. Active in the Daughters of Temperance, Anthony was refused the right to speak at a Sons of Temperance meeting in 1853, and the New York state legislature refused to recognize a petition limiting sale of alcohol circulated by Stanton and herself because most of the 28,000 signatures were by women.

Anthony, who never married, worked tirelessly for the suffragist movement for more than fifty years. During the 1850s Stanton, Anthony, and others allied themselves with the abolitionist movement and ultimately the Republican Party because they believed that their support would be rewarded by the extension of suffrage to women along with African American men. In the aftermath of the Civil War, frustrated and angered by their deliberate exclusion, they established the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and an affiliated newspaper, the Revolution, in 1868. When the suffrage movement split in 1869, Anthony and Stanton established the NWSA to advocate not only suffrage but also broader social and economic reforms for women. Anthony and several others were arrested in Rochester in 1872 when they attempted to test the limits of the Fifteenth Amendment by voting in the presidential election. Although they successfully cast their ballots, they were later arrested, convicted, and fined. Anthony refused to pay the fine, hoping to take the case to the Supreme Court. Her plans were foiled by her lawyer, who paid the costs himself to keep Anthony out of jail.

In 1877, using the Fifteenth Amendment as model, she authored the Anthony Amendment, and Senator Sargent submitted it to Congress on January 10, 1878. Although both the House and the Senate refused to consider the action, Anthony saw its presentation at every session of Congress until her death in 1916. The tradition of the Anthony Amendment continued until its eventual passage in 1919.

Between 1878 and her death in 1906, Anthony continued to promote her cause. She participated in the reunion of the NWSA and the AWSA in 1890 and served as the NAWSA's second president (after Stanton) until 1900. She also broadened her horizons to establish the International Council of Women in 1888 and the International Woman Suffrage Council in 1904. To celebrate her eighty-sixth birthday, Anthony delivered the “Failure Is Impossible” speech, the title of which became the rallying cry of the woman suffrage movement. She returned to Rochester, New York, and on March 13, 1906, at her home, Anthony succumbed to congestive heart failure.