Happy Birthday, 19th Amendment!
🎂🗳️🥳
The Nineteenth Amendment granting women the vote was ratified on August 18, 1920.
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.
Sounds so reasonable and straightforward, doesn’t it? And yet it took more than 70 years of picketing and stumping, hunger striking and behind-the-scenes deal-making for American women to reach this historic place. Why?
Seneca Falls Convention
Turns out the history of women’s suffrage is A LOT more nuanced than what I learned in high school. A side trip in the mid-aughts to Seneca Falls, New York, site of the first U.S. women’s rights convention (July 19-20, 1848)1 was the start of a deeper dive into the subject of suffrage. The convention birthed a 24-page feminist manifesto, the Declaration of Sentiments, which put forth eleven resolutions for women to better their lot. The most controversial, No. 9, called for women “to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”2
Flash forward to 1900 when an octogenarian Susan B. Anthony would pass the leadership baton to Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), her successor as president of The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). By then, the movement had shifted its base from the east coast, New York specifically, to the more politically progressive Midwest. Catt herself was born in Wisconsin but came of age in Iowa, as an educator rising to the position of county school superintendent and co-owner of a local newspaper with her first husband.3
Catt’s fellow suffragist and later, domestic partner, Indiana born Mary Garrett Hay (1857-1928) had followed in her father’s footsteps, studying pharmacy and working as a druggist. Like many suffragist leaders at the turn-of-the-century, Hay got her activist feet wet volunteering for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which pushed for a prohibition on alcohol at the national, state and local levels.4
The overlap between temperance and women’s suffrage would prove problematic when attempting to win over “wet” states like California. In 1896, the Liquor Dealers League, fearing enfranchised women would vote as a block, mounted a virulent anti-suffrage campaign, squelching a referendum to include women’s suffrage in California’s constitution.5
The Battle But Not the War
By 1919, fifteen states, including New York, had granted women full suffrage and others had granted partial suffrage. But campaigning state by state was an arduous process; a federal suffrage amendment was the elusive gold standard.
On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the Nineteenth Amendment. Two weeks later, on June 4, 1919, it passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 56-25.
For the Nineteenth Amendment to be added to the Constitution, two-thirds (36) of the then 48 states had to vote in favor. A grueling fourteen-month boots-on-the-ground campaign ensued to bring around the 17 southern states, most of which stood solidly in the anti-suffrage camp.6
Victory
On August 18, 1920, the last of the southern holdouts, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to sign off on the amendment after a brutal back-and-forth battle waged between anti- and pro-suffrage forces led by Catt assembled in the state capital, Nashville.7
Attempts by antis to overturn the Tennessee vote delayed ratification certification by a week. On August 26, a weary but victorious Catt left Nashville for Washington, DC where she spent the day in meetings at the Departments of State and Justice before addressing the suffrage mass meeting and jubilee at Poli’s Theater at 8 p.m.8
The next day, on August 27th, New York Governor Al Smith and a delegation of suffragists greeted Catt at Pennsylvania Station with a bouquet of blue and yellow flowers — the “votes for women” colors — “from the 27,000,000 enfranchised women of the United States.”9
A Bipartisan Effort
“Women will be as scattered in their convictions as the men have been…It is absurd, however, to say that they will solidly vote either ticket.”
— Carrie Chapman Catt
From its outset, the suffrage movement had been a bipartisan effort, supported by women (and some men)10 affiliated with both major political parties.
During the August 27th ratification celebration at the Waldorf-Astoria, Catt would call out for special thanks the suffragist liaisons for both major parties: Mrs. George Bass of Chicago, “a pudding stick that kept the Democratic men stirred up” and Hay who had held down the fort with the Republicans.
November 2, 2020 witnessed the first presidential election in which the newly enfranchised women could vote. The candidates were both native Ohioans: the incumbent, Warren G. Harding (Republican) and the contender, James M. Cox, a two-time governor of the Buckeye state (Democrat).11 Hay registered as a Republican while Catt remained an independent.12 The pair arrived at their polling station at 111th Street and Broadway to cast their first ballots.13
After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park transformed NAWSA into the nonpartisan National League of Women Voters, which aimed to educate the electorate, especially newly enfranchised women, about candidates and campaign issues.
For Black women in the Jim Crow South, the bullying, threats of violence and sabotaging electoral practices used to deny black men their voting rights after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) were now turned on them.14 Native American women and men would wait another four years when Congress passed The Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, finally – and ironically – recognizing them as citizens.15 It wasn’t until The Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the federal government finally stepped in to enforce universal enfranchisement.16
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https://www.nps.gov/wori/index.htm
https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/seneca-falls-convention
[1] Chapman Catt, Carrie, Shuler, Nettie Wade, Boyd, Mary Sumner and Rogers, Henry Wade, The Inner Story of the Suffrage Movement, Reissued 2018, Madison & Adams Press.
Gray Lillian, “Mary Garrett Hay: Organizer of Women’s Associations,” The Decatur Herald, June 28, 1903, p. 7.
The referendum was narrowly defeated owing to three prominent cities: San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento, strongholds for the Liquor Dealers League where the suffragists were trounced by between 5,000 and 6,000 votes. Silver, May, “Women Claim the Vote in California. Historical Essay.” FoundSF.org, 1995.
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe In Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History. June8, 2000, HarperOne, pp. 63, 69.
The Chattanooga News, “Supplemental Call. Governor Roberts Includes Number of Other Matters for Legislation,” August 10, 1920, p. 8.
The Washington Times, “DC Ready for ‘Suff” Jubilee. Mrs. Catt Arrives in Capital to Address Poli’s Celebration Tonight,” p. 13.
Evening Star, “Suffragists Hail Victory as Anti’s Launch New Fight.” August 27, 1920, p. 1.
The Declaration of Sentiments was signed by 32 men including Frederick Douglass. https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm
Daily News, “Women in the Voting Lines for the First Time Feature Presidential Election,” November 3, 1920 p. 30.
[1] The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 2, 1928, 42.
St. Louis Post Dispatch, “Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt and Miss Mary Garrett Hay, Suffrage Workers” (Photo Caption), November 5, 1920, p. 23.
Staples, Brent, “When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy” (Opinion), The New York Times, February 2, 2019.
Library of Congress (Online), “Elections the American Way. Voting Rights for Native Americans,” https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/elections/voting-rights-native-americans.html
A&E Television Networks, The History Channel, “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act, April 6, 2019.
Happy Women's Equality Day!
(I was away and am catching up.)