Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Context

The movement for women's suffrage in the United States can trace its beginnings to the eighteenth century and the period of the American Revolution. Women such as the playwright and historian Mercy Otis Warren; the writer and educational reformer Judith Sargent Murray; and Abigail Adams, the wife of President John Adams, questioned the traditional roles and limitations placed on American women. While Adams wrote to her husband advising him not to forget women at the same time that American male leaders were deliberating the rights of men, Murray contemplated the inequality of educational opportunities extended to male and female children. She argued, “How is the one exalted and the other depressed, by the contrary modes of education that are adopted! The one is taught to aspire, the other is early confined and limited” (qtd. in Flexner, p. 16). An Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, laid the theoretical bases and raised the fundamental questions pursued by American women's rights advocates for the next 120 years. The most fundamental and, at times, controversial tenet of her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was that the rights of men and of women were identical.

In the 1840s, during a period of more generalized reform efforts, the issue of women's rights emerged as a concerted cause. In the midst of earlier movements advocating reforms in education and prisons, abolition, and temperance, women began to question their status. Many outspoken advocates of reforms in education and for the abolition of slavery, such as Sarah Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anthony, found the suppression of their voices on the ground of their femininity frustrating and indicative of their larger problems. The exclusion of women from the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London in 1840 resulted in the direct comparison of slaves' and women's lack of freedoms. The Women's Rights Convention that met at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 marks the official beginning of the women's rights movement in the United States. More than three hundred individuals, including Stanton, the Quaker social reformer Lucretia Coffin Mott, and the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, attended the conference, and at its conclusion sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Over the next decade the movement advocated not only for woman suffrage but also for more radical ideals, such as women's property rights, the abolition of a double standard in divorce laws, and the rights of women to testify and to sign contracts. The movement attracted supporters to the cause, most notably Anthony, who attended the annual convention in Syracuse in 1852. During the late 1850s and 1860s the movement's leaders and grassroots supporters channeled their efforts into Civil War work and the strident advocacy of abolition. They also conjectured that along with African Americans they would be legally recognized at the end of the struggle.

Although their hopes did not materialize, the training and experiences garnered during this period served them well during the decades that followed the war. In 1866 Stanton and Anthony established the American Equal Rights Association, an organization open to white and African American women whose aim was universal suffrage. The suffragists suffered a setback in 1868 when the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which extended the protections of the Constitution to all citizens but defined a citizen as specifically male. Disputes over how to deal with crises created by the amendment's ratification and the proposed Fifteenth Amendment created a breach in the movement resulting in the establishment of two rival organizations. In 1869 Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in New York. The more radical of two organizations, the NWSA limited its membership to women only and campaigned for a variety of women's social and economic issues in addition to suffrage. Its rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), was more conservative in nature. Its founders, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Henry Browne Blackwell, limited participation in national meetings to recognized delegates and its mission solely to suffrage. Its members believed that social and economic issues distracted their energies and alienated influential supporters. Rather than working for a national resolution, the group advocated a state-by-state approach to accomplishing its goal.

In 1878 Anthony wrote what would become known as the Anthony Amendment. Modeled on the recently ratified Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing suffrage to all men regardless of race, this resolution would remove gender as a qualification for suffrage. Anthony and her colleagues in the NWSA persuaded a sympathetic senator from California, Aaron A. Sargent, to introduce it to Congress on January 10, 1878. Congress declined to act on the proposal, but its supporters continued to reintroduce it at every session of Congress until its eventual passage forty-one years later.

During that period the woman suffrage and rights movements underwent a multitude of changes and challenges. Perhaps most significant was the reconciliation of the NWSA and AWSA in 1890. Initiated in 1887 by members of the AWSA and negotiated by Alice Stone Blackwell (the daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell), their merger into the National American Woman Suffrage Association marked an important turning point in the movement. While the early leaders of both factions remained visible, younger women took up the standards and continued the fight. Anthony was among the last of the earlier generation and carefully cultivated her successors, Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. By 1910 all of the first generation had passed from the scene. Between 1890 and the passage of the Anthony Amendment by Congress in 1919 a variety of organizations joined the fight. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union had from its inception in 1878 supported woman suffrage as a tool for promoting temperance. The National Council of Jewish Women (1893), the National Association of Colored Women (1896), and the Women's Trade Union League (1903) broadened the movement's base of support and drew in women left at the fringes by the NAWSA, which tended to represent white, Protestant women of the middle and upper classes. The movement also had it opponents, including mainstream politicians, businessmen, liquor manufacturers, factions of the Catholic Church, and other women. The best-organized dissenting faction, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, emerged in 1911, led by Mrs. Arthur Dodge.

By the 1910s the question concerning woman suffrage became when and not if it would be achieved. In 1916 the NAWSA president, Catt, introduced her plan at the group's annual meeting in Atlantic City. She called on her membership to mobilize women at all levels of society, to curry support from all sources, and to target politicians whose positions were antithetical to the goal of woman suffrage. At the state level, a number of legislatures authorized partial or state suffrage. Another factor that worked in their favor was the growing anti-immigration sentiment across the nation. Ironically, many white, Protestant men of the middle and upper classes saw the suffragists and the allied causes as sympathetic to their interests and a way of balancing out the growing pool of naturalized immigrants joining the cadre of voters.

While the United States’s entry into World War I temporarily dampened the suffragists' efforts as the majority of suffragists put their energies into war work, their patriotism and service ultimately had great benefits. Their efforts swayed many of their opponents to the cause. The most significant convert was President Woodrow Wilson, who voiced his support for the amendment in 1918.

It took an additional eighteen months to unseat some of the suffragists' staunchest opponents in Congress. The Anthony Amendment passed through the House in May 1919 and was approved by the Senate on June 4 by a vote of fifty-six to thirty-two. Fourteen months later, on August 18, 1920, the state of Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state legislature to ratify the resolution, and the Nineteenth Amendment became law.