Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The document is divided into three parts: a preface, a definition of the desired goal, and the amendment itself. The amendment itself contains two sections.

The preface explains that the resolution is before the first session of the Sixty-Sixth Congress. (This count refers to the number of different Houses of Representatives elected since 1787.) The preface also includes the date, May 1919, and the location of the meeting, Washington, D.C.

The second portion of the document describes the resolution and the process of congressional approval and ratification by the states. The proposed amendment mandates a change in the U.S. Constitution to permit women to vote. It also indicates that in a joint session, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve by at least a two-thirds majority the resolution on the floor. It proceeds to state that the resolution becomes law when legislatures in “three-fourths” of the states (thirty-six) ratify it.

The final part of the document is the amendment itself. It states that gender does not constitute a basis for the denial of suffrage and thus defines women as citizens. It also affirms the right of the federal government to pass other legislation to enforce the suffrage provision.

Additional Commentary by Michael J. O’Neal, Ph.D.

Anthony is usually credited with authorship of the Nineteenth Amendment. She wrote a version of the amendment in 1877, basing its wording on the Fifteenth Amendment, which said that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (that is, slavery). A sympathetic California senator, Aaron Sargent, submitted the amendment to the U.S. Congress, which refused to take action on it. As the proposal was resubmitted in every session of Congress in the decades that followed, it came to be referred to as the Anthony Amendment.

After Anthony’s death in 1906, pressure for passage of the amendment began to mount. It culminated in 1917 after the United States entered World War I. Early that year, the so-called Silent Sentinels, a group of suffragists led by Alice Paul, among others, began a two-and-a-half-year picket (with Sundays off) of the White House, urging President Woodrow Wilson to support a suffrage amendment. Public opinion began to sway in favor of the suffragists when it was learned that many of the picketers had been arrested and sentenced to jail, usually on thin charges of obstructing traffic, and that the conditions the jailed women endured were often brutal. Alice Paul, in particular, was subjected to inhuman treatment and launched a hunger strike in protest until she and the other protestors were released after a court of appeals ruled the arrests illegal.

Finally, on January 9, 1918, Wilson announced that he supported the amendment. On January 10, 1918, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the amendment, but the Senate refused to consider the matter until October, when the measure failed by just three votes. In response, the newly formed National Women’s Party, led by Alice Paul, mounted a campaign against legislators who supported the Democratic Party’s resistance to bringing the suffrage amendment to a vote in Congress and were up for reelection—as she and her supporters had done in 1914. These efforts, along with efforts to mold public opinion, were successful, for on May 21, 1919, after the House of Representatives passed the measure by a vote of 304 to 89, the Senate, on June 4, passed it by a vote of fifty-six to twenty-five. The amendment was then submitted to the states for ratification. The first state to ratify it was Illinois. Thirty-six states needed to ratify the amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. That number was reached on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee, following contentious debate and two deadlocked roll calls, ratified it after one legislator, Harry Burn, changed his vote on the urging of his mother. Oddly, several states throughout the South initially rejected the amendment and were quite slow to ratify it later, the last being Mississippi in 1984.

The language of the amendment is simple and straightforward. A preface notes that the resolution, dated May 1919, is before the first session of the Sixty-sixth Congress in Washington, D.C. The preface is followed by a description of the resolution and the process of approving it, including congressional approval and ratification by the states. In particular, it says that the resolution has to be approved by a two-thirds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and that it must be ratified, or approved, by three fourths of the states—at that time, thirty-six states (out of forty-eight). The third part of the document is the text of the amendment itself, stating that citizens cannot be denied the right to vote on the basis of sex and that Congress has the power to enforce the amendment by legislation.