thesis on 19th amendment

Harvard Journal of Law & Gender

A student-edited feminist publication of Harvard Law School

The 19th Amendment at 100: Modern Challenges

By Nicole Williamson*

August 2020 marks one hundred years since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote in the United States. As stated quite simply in the Amendment’s text , “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.” These foundational words ushered in a new era of women’s rights in the United States, as enfranchisement further empowered women to voice their concerns and seek office. Yet women’s suffrage was hardly accomplished by a unified female voice; indeed, the movement was fractured and exclusionary in effectuating its goals. Today, the question of voting rights remains a similarly controversial and divided issue fraught with racial and political tension. On the eve of this momentous centennial, it is imperative to our modern voting rights debate to understand how the Nineteenth Amendment came to be, who was left behind, and what barriers still frustrate full female enfranchisement.

Securing the Right to Vote

Most historical accounts of women’s suffrage begin with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, from which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched a decades-long struggle to secure women’s right to vote. These women , along with figures such as Lucy Stone, and later, Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul, helped raise national consciousness of women’s rights and unleashed a rallying cry that would drive the movement towards its ultimate success.

Though grade-school lessons depict a coherent, impassioned rise to victory, a more accurate historical narrative warps this idyllic image. When the proposed Fifteenth Amendment sought to enfranchise black males, white women suffragists rose up in protest, dividing the movement into two camps polarized on the issue of race : “those who felt that Black men needed the vote even more than women, and those who were unwilling to postpone woman suffrage for the sake of Black males.” [1] After this division — and even as the movement more generally excluded the voices of women of color — black women continued to seek membership in the “mainstream” white feminist movement. At the same time, black suffragists coalesced into parallel black civic groups advocating for women’s right to vote. [2] For black women, the barriers were two-fold: a simultaneous fight against racism and sexism. By 1918, when the movement stood at the precipice of winning its hard-fought battle, white women again confronted this racial divide: including black women in the folds of the Nineteenth Amendment risked turning away Southerners, putting the Amendment’s passage at risk. [3] Securing the right to vote thus involved more than the enfranchisement question itself — it required determining who should be included and how soon. These questions were not initially evaluated with an eye towards equality.

Ultimately, the Nineteenth Amendment did enfranchise black women, granting voting rights on equal footing with white women. On the day of ratification, the victory was one secured for all women.

  Yet for black women, this victory was short-lived. Less than a decade after enfranchisement under the Nineteenth Amendment, southern black women found themselves stripped of political power and effective voting rights. [4] By 1940 only 3 percent of voting-age black men and women in the South were registered to vote , a result of the widespread racial violence and intimidation campaign launched by white southerners under Jim Crow. By 1964, 43 percent of black southerners were registered to vote , a hard-won improvement amid increasing violence. Despite the Nineteenth Amendment’s symbolic political victory, for black women the ability to vote came instead by way of the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , which secured full voting rights over forty years after initial legal enfranchisement. Thus, though the Amendment was a clear victory for women, its ratification did not immediately benefit all women — many, like southern black women, struggled for years to exercise their rights.

Modern-Day Challenges: Who is Still Left Behind?

  As the nation faces an increasingly diverse voting pool, with racial and minority groups projected to become a majority of the population in 2043, it is more crucial than ever before to protect voting rights for women, and in particular women of color. We must therefore assess: where do we currently stand on voting rights, and what barriers impede full rights and representation?

  Fundamentally, women have made enormous leaps in terms of voter turnout in recent years. Women constitute the majority of registered voters, and since 1980 have voted at higher rates than men in presidential elections. Indeed, since President Obama’s election in 2008, black women have had the highest voting rates of the total female population age 18 or older, voting at 66.1 percent, compared to 64.5 percent of non-Hispanic white women.

Yet challenges remain turnout-wise. For example, Hispanic women and Asian women vote at much lower rates — 33.9 and 32 percent , respectively. White voters are still far more likely than any other group to be “consistent” voters, with lower “continued voter engagement” among minority communities . Generationally, young adults are also far less likely than their senior counterparts to vote — 28 percent versus 74 percent in the 2018 election .

What depresses minority turnout? One major driver of disenfranchisement has increasingly become voter identification laws. Studies on the impact of ID laws, which require certain standards of identification in order to vote, demonstrate that “women, especially low-income, older, minority, and married women,” are most vulnerable to these stringent new laws. Women generally have more trouble than men presenting proper identification, in part because marrying or divorcing often involve name changes that make it harder to present multiple, matching forms of identification. In terms of race, Black and Hispanic Americans are generally three times more likely to be told that they lack the identification needed to vote. Even more commonly, one in ten Americans has trouble taking off work in order to vote – a rate even higher amongst Black or Hispanic Americans (16%) than White Americans (8%). There are clear barriers that make it harder for women and people of color to vote, demonstrating that even today, women of color still face major impediments to exercising full voting rights first granted over one hundred years ago under the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Despite the significant barriers to political rights posed by voter ID laws and similar devices, many don’t view voting issues in the same light. White Americans “are far less likely than black and Hispanic Americans to express concerns about eligible voters being denied the right to vote,” with only one quarter of white Americans finding denial of the right to vote to be a serious issue , compared to nearly two thirds of black and Hispanic Americans. Moreover, there is a marked divide along partisan lines, with conservatives viewing voter fraud as much more pressing than voter disenfranchisement, a paramount concern for liberals. Sharp political divides have framed how Americans see our political and electoral system, in the end calling attention away from the pressing issue of disenfranchisement — and ultimately, leaving vulnerable populations unable to exercise their rights.

Politics aside, the question of enfranchisement touches on our most fundamental rights under the Constitution. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in her Shelby v. Holder  dissent , “[race discrimination and the right to vote are] the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination, and the most fundamental right in our democratic system.” While partisan factions may vie for the chance to control the national narrative, what is most at stake is individual voices and their representation in our democracy. The Nineteenth Amendment granted the right to vote regardless of sex — and going forward, this right must be protected for all women, especially for minority women whose voting rights are most at stake today.

*Nicole Williamson is a 3L at Harvard Law School

[1] Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920,  at 8.

[2] Black female leaders on voting rights included Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Angela Davis, amongst many other inspirational women.

[3] Terborg-Penn at 11.

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote

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Interchange: Women's Suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Right to Vote, Journal of American History , Volume 106, Issue 3, December 2019, Pages 662–694, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz506

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Soon after the U.S. Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment in early June 1919, state legislatures began to deliberate the question of women's suffrage. Ratification proceedings, which persisted for more than a year, unfolded against a backdrop of extraordinary rage, fear, and uncertainty in the United States. After World War I the decline of manufacturing and the demobilization of soldiers contributed to a painful recession. Across the long red summer, mobs of angry whites terrorized African American communities, lynching dozens of persons and burning homes and churches. Emboldened by union activism and the specter of Bolshevist revolution, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of brutal raids, arresting and attempting to deport thousands of immigrant workers. In Congress, the dry majority overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, heralding a new era of prohibition. Amid this social and political tumult, the Nineteenth Amendment wound its way toward ratification.

What did the amendment, a milestone of American democracy, mean to a nation so deeply committed to white supremacy and immigration restriction? What were its implications for an aspiring empire then exerting military power overseas? How, if at all, did it affect politics and law in the United States?

To promote critical reflection about the Nineteenth Amendment and its many complex legacies, the Journal of American History announces a new series, Sex, Suffrage, Solidarities: Centennial Reappraisals. This series, which will run throughout the coming year, will consist of research articles, special features, and reviews published across the JAH , the JAH Podcast , and Process: a blog for American history . Our theme for the project—sex, suffrage, solidarities—is intended to provoke new questions about the Nineteenth Amendment and the political, economic, and cultural transformations of which it has been a part. Our ambition is to foster creative thinking about suffrage, its discursive and material frameworks, and its often-unanticipated consequences. We intend to examine the intricate linkages among suffrage, citizenship, identities, and differences. We aim to facilitate global, transnational, and/or comparative perspectives, particularly those that compel us to reperiodize or otherwise reassess conventional ways of thinking about campaigns for women's rights and adult citizenship.

To inaugurate this series, we invited a panel of distinguished historians—Ellen Carol DuBois, Liette Gidlow, Martha S. Jones, Katherine M. Marino, Leila J. Rupp, Lisa Tetrault, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu—to join in conversation about the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage, and women's political activism more broadly. The Interchange that follows reads by turns as essential historiography, compelling critique, and honest personal reflection. It offers invaluable context for, and analysis of, the study of women's rights in the United States. We are grateful to the participants and to our associate editor Judith Allen for her creative direction of this project.

Ellen Carol Dubois is Distinguished Professor (Emerita) in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (1978), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981; 3rd ed., forthcoming, 2020), Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997), and Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights: Essays (1998). Her next work, Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote , will be published in 2020. Readers may contact Dubois at [email protected] .

Liette Gidlow is the 2019–2020 Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an associate professor of history at Wayne State University. She is the author of The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s (2004) and editor of Obama, Clinton, Palin: Making History in Election 2008 (2012). She is now preparing a book manuscript entitled The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970 . Readers may contact Gidlow at [email protected] .

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015). Her next book, Vanguard: A History of African American Women's Politics , will appear in 2020. Readers may contact Jones at [email protected] .

Katherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her Stanford University dissertation won the Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history from the Organization of American Historians; she has since revised and published it as Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019). Readers may contact Marino at [email protected] .

L Eila J. Rupp is Distinguished Professor of feminist studies and associate dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published nine books and more than two dozen articles, among them Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), co-authored with Verta Taylor, and Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997). She is now researching queer college students in the contemporary United States. Readers may contact Rupp at [email protected] .

Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of the Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), which won the inaugural Mary Jurich Nickliss women's and gender history book prize awarded by the Organization of American Historians. She is working on a book about where and how women's suffrage fit into the political landscape after the American Civil War and another project tracing the genealogy of the Nineteenth Amendment. Readers may contact Tetrault at [email protected] .

J Udy Tzu-Chun Wu is a professor in the Department of Asian American Studies and director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). She is now researching the career of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Readers may contact her at [email protected] .

JAH: U.S. historians have closely studied women's suffrage. In the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners of the new women's history wrote extensively about women's enfranchisement and citizenship, as well as the nineteenth-century reform movements that inspired support for—but also opposition to—them. These aspects of political history remained a core priority for women's historians in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The publication of numerous authoritative biographies, organizational studies, and documentary collections enriched our knowledge of these subjects.

As you think back over this field, what are your impressions? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What works, methodologies, or interventions do you find most crucial?

Leila J. Rupp : When I began my graduate work in 1972, it was pretty much possible to read all the existing scholarship on women's history. My introduction to women's suffrage began with Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (1959), Aileen S. Kraditor's The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1965), Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967), and the less well-remembered The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage by Alan P. Grimes (1967). As an undergraduate in Herbert Aptheker's class on African American history, I wrote a paper on the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, relying heavily on Lerner's work to guide me to the sources. Then in 1978 came Barbara J. Berg's The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism and the now-classic Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 , by Ellen Carol DuBois. 1

When I think about this early literature and the subsequent development of the scholarship on suffrage, citizenship, and the women's movement over time, three themes come to mind. The first is the increasing attention to the importance of race, ethnicity, and class. Both Flexner and Lerner, embedded in the progressive Left, attended to issues of race and class, but the racial complexities of the suffrage movement that grew out of the abolitionist struggle did not take center stage, as they would in later literature. DuBois, also coming out of a left feminist context, detailed the failure of a joint struggle for black suffrage and woman suffrage during Reconstruction, the inability of suffragists to forge an alliance with organized labor, and the racism and class bias that underlay and were exacerbated by these failures. Yet, the point of her book is that these developments led to the emergence of an independent women's movement, a positive development in the long run. Since 1978 we have, of course, learned much more about the role that black women, with a foot in both race and gender politics, played in achieving suffrage, from works such as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998). 2

A second theme that characterizes the direction of scholarship over the decades is the continuity of the struggle for women's rights in the aftermath of suffrage victory in 1920. For a time, the Nineteenth Amendment seemed to mark the end of organized efforts to win women full citizenship until the emergence of the women's movement in the 1960s. Then a flood of studies addressed the intervening decades. What happened to the women's movement? Did it die out after suffrage was won? Scholarship on the 1920s and beyond—Susan D. Becker's The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (1981), Nancy F. Cott's The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2004), on labor activism, Cynthia Harrison's On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (1988), and my work with Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (1987), to name just a few—argued persuasively that it did not die out, and that it took a variety of forms. We came to think of “waves” of the women's movement—the first suffrage wave giving way to the second wave in the 1960s, with third and fourth waves to follow—only to back off from that metaphor to emphasize greater continuity than the rise and fall of waves seems to suggest. 3

This brings me to a third theme in the scholarship: placing the U.S. suffrage movement and subsequent activism in the context of transnational developments. In my Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (1997), I argued that a history of what I called an international women's movement, which picked up steam in the 1920s and 1930s, showed that rather than “waves” of activism we should think of “choppy seas.” Increasingly, as in other fields of U.S. history, women's historians are paying attention to the global context. Bonnie S. Anderson's Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000) makes it impossible to think about the Seneca Falls Convention as a purely American event. To give just a couple of other examples, Allison L. Sneider, in Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (2008), connects women's suffrage to U.S. imperialism, and Katherine M. Marino's Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019) details the ways that Latin American feminists in the 1920s and 1930s took the lead in fighting for economic, social, and legal equality on the global stage. 4

Ellen Carol Dubois : I begin by challenging the premise of the question itself. In the revival of women's history inspired by the women's liberation insurgence of the late 1960s into the 1970s, the American woman suffrage movement was not a topic of great interest. I believe that when I published Feminism and Suffrage in 1978, I was alone in reexamining the subject within a full-fledged scholarly monograph. 5

Other suffrage scholars—notably Eleanor Flexner and Aileen Kraditor—though highly influential, were not infused with the energies and the concerns of those women's liberation years. Others of my sister scholars in that pioneering women's generation addressed related subjects—I think particularly of Nancy Cott, Mari Jo Buhle, and Linda Gordon—and I was much influenced by them. But for the most part that entire generation of radical and social historians were not much interested in electoral politics. In our experience, established parties were indistinguishable and ineffective; many of us didn't even vote. Women's liberationists tended to dismiss the suffrage movement for leaving untouched the issues of women's oppression with which we were concerned. My challenge to that dismissal was reflected in the title of my first article on the subject, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement” (1975), published in an early issue of Feminist Studies . In it, I elaborated what I saw as the underlying premise of the suffrage movement, that women were full-fledged and rational individuals, not subservient to family. 6

Following the concerns of my late 1960s political generation, in Feminism and Suffrage I examined the emergence of the suffrage demand in the context of race and class politics. I considered at great length the terrible 1867–1869 schism between black suffrage and woman suffrage advocates. While lamenting the conflict, my conclusion, reflected in the book's title, was that the break freed suffrage leaders—Stanton and Anthony the boldest and most radically feminist of those—to pursue their own political path, no longer deferential to the concerns of racial equality dictated by the Republican party. Again, this argument reflected the experience of my own women's liberation generation as it separated itself from the influence of the male-dominated black power movement.

In my later JAH article, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878” (1987), I came to a different conclusion, emphasizing what was lost in 1869, the solidarity of these two movements. By then I was influenced by the first works of black suffrage scholars. Paula Giddings's brilliant When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984) was particularly important for me; I thought of it as the Century of Struggle for black women's history in its scope and bold interpretive stance. Of course, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (1977) was very important, but it should be remembered that it was available only as a difficult-to-access dissertation until it was published as a book in 1998. I still believe it necessary, in reconsidering suffrage history, to return to this tragic foundational conflict, especially as what we learn about the traditions of African American suffragism continues to grow. 7

While the racial dimension of the history of woman suffrage has received ever more attention, its class aspects have not, and this is unfortunate. Two of the six chapters of Feminism and Suffrage focused on Anthony's efforts to reach out to wage-earning women and forge a bond with the labor movement of the era. Mari Jo Buhle and Christine Stansell laid the basis for further exploration of these concerns and Diane Balser, Carole Turbin, and Susan Levine pursued the subject, but it has dropped off of suffrage scholars' radar in the current century. As we look over suffragism's seventy-five-year history and its impact on women's political activism after 1920, we should surely be struck by the prominence of women, many of whom began as suffragists, in the twentieth-century labor movement. As suffrage scholars, we should make it our business to dig into the deep, complex, and crucial interactions of race and class in American feminist politics. 8

Martha S. Jones : I came to women's history in the mid-1990s and am a beneficiary of so much work that predated my own. I also came to the field as a historian of African American women. Thus, my starting place was not with, for example, Flexner's Century of Struggle , though I would eventually get to that. Ellen DuBois's Feminism and Suffrage would soon join my list of essential reads. But the work of Terborg-Penn first shaped my thinking. Her 1977 Howard University Ph.D. dissertation, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” defined the field long before being published as African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . 9

Terborg-Penn's study conveyed three enduring insights for historians of black women—indeed, for historians of all women—and the vote. The first was that the work demanded painstaking recovery across an archival terrain not built to preserve black women as political thinkers or activists. Her sheer doggedness in the combing of sources was both an instruction about method and a cautionary tale. The second lesson was that we should not defer to, or trust, the often-cited sources that had long informed histories of women's suffrage. I remember locking horns with fellow graduate students in the 1990s about how to use the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage (a project initiated by Stanton and Anthony in the 1870s, with the last volume published in 1922). A nod here to Lisa Tetrault's important contribution to this point with The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014). It was from Terborg-Penn that I learned the politics that animated those volumes and then how to set them aside and avoid being misled. Finally, Terborg-Penn taught me to be unflinching about how racism had infected the minds of some of the best-remembered white women's suffrage activists. I learned that racism had been woven into the fabric of the movement's strategies and tactics. Today, thirty years later, some historians still struggle with how to write about this dimension of the movement. Terborg-Penn put that dilemma squarely in front of us. 10

I also read Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter in the mid-1990s. It opens with the often-quoted words of the African American scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper from 1892: “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood … then and there the whole … race enters with me.’” This quotation told us much that we need to know about African American women's politics at the end of the nineteenth century. Cooper and others like her were charting their own way forward as women by the 1890s. Giddings anticipated, if not called into being, the field of African American women's history, which blossomed by the early 1990s. 11

Giddings begins her study with Ida B. Wells's antilynching campaign. This choice is a lesson in the history of women's suffrage. Black activist women such as Wells did not focus on a single issue in their view of women's rights, including the vote. Women's rights were in the service of human rights—rights that extended to women and to men. Giddings recognizes that black women's striving for the vote was interwoven with concerns about antilynching, temperance, the club movement, and Jim Crow. Challenging the periodization of the women's suffrage movement, Giddings's section on Fannie Lou Hamer sent a clear signal: for black women, the movement for suffrage extended to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment (not unlike ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment) was only one stop along a hard-won route to political power. 12

Neither Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) nor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993) was expressly about women suffrage. Still, I read them as essential studies of how, where, and when black women built political power. Rather than in parlors or conventions, the roots of black women's politics lay in labor, loss, and survival on plantations. There, cruel myths about black women were crafted; the battle against such ideas animated black women's suffrage politics. Higginbotham's study of black Baptist women runs parallel to the histories of the American Woman Suffrage Association ( Awsa ), the National Woman Suffrage Association ( Nwsa ), and the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( Nawsa ), as well as the so-called women's suffrage movement. But we see the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification from a new perspective when we take the point of view of hundreds of thousands of black Baptist women. They did their political work within religious communities. Locating black women's politics on the plantation and in the church changed forever the way we would tell the history of black women and the vote. 13

These threads and more run through my 2007 book, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 . What I had learned from the earliest works in African American women's history was how the politics of suffrage, for black women, was always “bound up” with broad concerns, diverse institutions, and differences among and between women, black and white. 14

Lisa Tetrault : When I began reading in this field in the late 1990s, there was little published about post–Civil War women's suffrage. As a result, after I finished Ellen DuBois's necessary Feminism and Suffrage , and several of her seminal articles, I turned to History of Woman Suffrage simply to learn basic historical outlines. I was struck not only by the majesty of Stanton, Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage's recovery and preservation work, but also by their enormous silences and unmistakable emphases. 15

Also in the 1990s, Nell Painter published Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996), which bore heavily on themes of narrativity and power. In her articles as well as her book, she emphasized how Truth had been mythologized rather than remembered as a fully rendered human being and complex historical actor. The origin of the oft-cited “ain't I a woman speech” in primary-document readers (and increasingly online) was often the History of Woman Suffrage , which reprinted that problematic formulation from Frances Dana Gage. Painter's work on narrative and its present-day legacies were deeply influential for me. 16

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published her highly respected dissertation in that decade as well, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote . That book strove to unmask and rebuild a basic narrative around women and voting. It too underscored how Stanton and Anthony helped create many of the outlines around something bounded (if still vast) called women's suffrage that nevertheless left out many women and political projects. 17

Over the 1990s and into the early 2000s, scores of new works broke down the idea that women existed in a separate sphere removed from politics. Women need not be domestic and women need not be enfranchised to exercise political power, and women engaged in politics in plenty of places we hadn't thought to look. 18

At the same time, my reading of the rapidly transforming field of Reconstruction-era scholarship signaled the end to a debate that bled from the 1980s into the 1990s: Was women's suffrage radical or conservative? Consequential or inconsequential? The nuanced, fine-grained analyses of power, race, citizenship, gender, freedom, and voting in Reconstruction scholarship, combined with women's political history, underscored that there was no one fixed issue to assess. Whether women's suffrage was radical or conservative, consequential or inconsequential, now seemed beside the point.

Finally, historians such as Elsa Barkley Brown, Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, and the political scientist Victoria Hattam all questioned whether the franchise was even a stable category. Did it too need to be contextualized, interrogated, and historically understood? They clearly answered, “yes.” 19

Liette Gidlow : I have always seen histories of women's suffrage as part of broad histories of political institutions, political culture, women, and gender. Perhaps this is because I came to the study of women's/gendered politics through a different door. When I arrived at my Ph.D. program in history I came with an undergraduate background in political science; work experience in the D.C. Public Defender's office, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and the Ohio legislature; and a feminist consciousness sharpened on issues of campus sexual assault and workplace harassment. My first exposure to women's studies came as an undergrad through feminist literary criticism, and my early interest in race and public policy was cultivated by working with Gary Orfield on issues of racial equity in education and by serving as a staffer to Rep. Julian Dixon in the 1980s. Representative Dixon at the time was the only African American subcommittee chair on the House Appropriations Committee, meaning that all manner of policy issues related to African American constituencies found their way to his desk, and thus mine.

All of these pieces, and a few others, came together in graduate school in the 1990s in a historically grounded way when I started investigating the League of Women Voters' Get Out the Vote ( Gotv ) campaigns of the 1920s. “Politics” clearly extended beyond electoral politics to the full range of ways power was being deployed, and yet “officialness” still mattered. I was especially interested in the nexus of the politics of representation and discourse, on the one hand, and the politics of formal governmental institutions, on the other. How has civic legitimacy historically been constructed, institutionalized, and contested, and what do race, gender, class, sexual preference, religion, and other sources of identity have to do with it? In an era of ostensibly universal suffrage, why did the members of the League of Women Voters feel they needed Gotv campaigns? Why were they trying to get out the votes of middle-class whites, who had the highest turnout, and not those of the working class and/or people of color, who were much less likely to vote? And what did it mean for anyone to be a good citizen in an era in which a majority of eligible voters did not cast ballots, as was the case in 1920 and 1924? Clearly gender, class, and race had a great deal to do with the answers to these questions.

Scholarship on suffrage and Progressive Era women reformers laid crucial foundations for my explorations, and I was especially indebted to work by Paula Baker, Jean Baker, Sarah Hunter Graham, and Robyn Muncy. More theoretical works, in particular Joan W. Scott's “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (1986) and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race” (1992), helped me think about meaning-making, because I was interested in not only what the vote accomplished but also what enfranchisement signified and how that changed over time. Scholarship outside the conventional categories of “women's history” and “suffrage history” helped me explore the interplay between formal political institutions and processes and the politics of meaning-making. Nancy Fraser's essay on counterpublics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1992), was essential in helping me think about discourse and resistance. Joseph R. Gusfield's The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (1981) made me think about the framing of public issues. James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980) made me think about resistance in new ways. Works by Warren Sussman, Louis Althusser, Clifford Geertz, and Antonio Gramsci made me think about power dynamics embedded in everyday processes of meaning-making. 20

It was really after graduate school that I immersed myself more deeply in historical treatments of women's politics, broadly defined—in part because I was beginning to teach women's history surveys, and in part out of a growing appreciation for the power of narrative and the richness of stories focused on people rather than political institutions. Barbara Ransby's Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), Katherine Mellen Charron's Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (2009), Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent , and Lisa G. Materson's study of black women's electoral activism in the context of the Great Migration ( For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 [2009]) stand out among many books that helped open the way to my current book project, “The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race, 1920–1970.” 21

JAH: Professor Gidlow mentioned biographies of Ella Baker and Septima Clark. Are there other biographies that have particularly influenced your thinking about women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment, or women's political activism more broadly?

Jones : I'd like to focus on the role of biography in writing and rewriting the history of women's suffrage. Let me digress just long enough to say that I think nomenclature is important here, so I will use the phrase “women and the vote” rather than “women's suffrage.” With this, I am signaling that my discussions are generally about the broader question of women and the vote, and not about the Nineteenth Amendment in particular. A discussion too narrowly framed by the Nineteenth Amendment relegates many American women to the margins.

African American women's history has produced a robust body of book-length, scholarly biographical works. This genre makes plain that African American women have approached voting rights through campaigns directly organized around suffrage, but they also did so through many other collectives, from clubs and churches to political parties and antislavery societies. Black women's biographies inform my understanding of how to write black women's political history, including their concern with voting rights.

For example, I've come back to Jane Rhodes's biography of Mary Ann Shadd Cary ( Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century , 1998). Rhodes was most interested in Cary's fascinating work as a journalist, but she takes us through a life that includes affiliation with the Nwsa and a role in suffrage campaigns in Washington, D.C. Melba Joyce Boyd's Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (1994) is at its heart a literary biography. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the only African American woman to speak on the record during the fraught American Equal Rights Association meetings of the 1860s. Her interventions are essential to any telling of mid-nineteenth-century suffrage politics. When Harper told those gathered that they were “all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she asserted a human rights vision that remained at the core of black women's thinking about the vote and perhaps remains there today. 22

Nell Painter's magnificent Sojourner Truth refuses to let Truth's memory merely serve the interests of others. We must grapple with Truth's complex, multifaceted life if we are to write about her at all. Painter's insight into racism—both as animus and as paternalism—is an essential lesson. Those who patronized Truth should not be understood as having wholly respected or made space for the entirety of Truth's humanity, even if they incorporated her into women's conventions, the History of Woman Suffrage , and more. 23

Add to these Jean Fagan Yellin's Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004), which introduces sexual violence as a women's rights issue; two biographies of Harriet Tubman (Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom [2004] and Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero [2004]), which remind us that in the last years of her life Tubman stumped for women's suffrage; and Marilyn Richardson's pathbreaking Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (1987), which wholly resets our periodization of women's rights in the United States with 1832 Boston as a point of origin. Together these biographies are a rich portrait of how black women thought about and worked toward their political rights, while also laboring for human rights. 24

Biographical works often take the point of view of insurgent activists. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the important work on Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is foundational to my thinking about suffrage versus the vote versus politics versus power. Wells-Barnett was frustrated by Congress and political parties in her antilynching campaign, leading her to adapt an old internationalist vision for her own times. Here, Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009) and Paula J. Giddings's Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (2008) are must-reads. 25

But when I invoke insurgent politics, I am suggesting that the history of black women's politics and power cannot be understood without appreciating those who rejected the politics of the vote for other visions. Again, biographies let us see this clearly. Consider works from Barbara Ransby— Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (2013)—and Ula Yvette Taylor— The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002) and The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (2017). I'd also place Sherie M. Randolph's Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (2015) on a shelf of histories that call into question whether frameworks such as “suffrage” and the “vote” are even central to understanding African American women's history. These insurgent histories are counternarratives that ask hard questions about whether and to what degree women who worked for inclusion and equity in parties and at the polls might have been misled, misguided, or just plain mistaken in their objectives. 26

A few works hit a sweet spot where both the mainstream and the insurgent come together in illuminating ways. First, Barbara Winslow's Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (2013), gives us a figure who both leveled a radical challenge and worked within U.S. politics, and fought her way in with integrity. And there is Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999), which also manages to hold on to both the critique of and the striving to gain state power. For yet another figure who just might thread that needle, I'd add Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming (2018). I can't say that Mrs. Obama is at the end of the day an insurgent, but she tells a story about how a black woman strikes a precarious balance when she engages with the mainstream. In this respect, her autobiography reaches all the way back to figures such as Sojourner Truth, black women who tried to make themselves legible to the nation by way of an intersectional analysis of their lives and of American political culture. 27

I'll pitch some biographies still to be written (better yet if they are being written at this very moment): Sarah Mapps Douglass, Jarena Lee, Sarah Parker Remond, Anna Julia Cooper, Julia A. J. Foote, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Eliza Ann Gardner all come immediately to mind as women whose lives we know a good deal about and, still, whose biographies would further our understanding of how black women came to politics. There is little room left, it's safe to say, for the old view that black women were not engaged with women's issues or that they somehow placed the interests of black men above their own.

Dubois : A few crucial figures have recently received their first scholarly biographies: Alva Belmont (Sylvia Hoffert's Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights [2011]) and Anna Howard Shaw (Trisha Franzen's Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage [2014]). Franzen makes a strong case that much of what we thought we knew about Shaw comes to us through the unflattering lens of Carrie Chapman Catt's evaluation. The biographies and political studies of Ida B. Wells continue to accumulate (Mia Bay's To Tell the Truth Freely , Patricia A. Schechter's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 [2001], and the very interesting work of Crystal N. Feimster in Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching [2011]). Among other leading African American suffragists, Fannie Barrier Williams (in Wanda A. Hendricks's Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race [2013]) and Mary McLeod Bethune (in Joyce A. Hanson's Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism [2013]) now have their first biographies. Importantly, Alison Park is forthcoming with a new biography of Mary Church Terrell. Other especially compelling twentieth-century figures are also the subject of new biographies: Jeannette Rankin (Norma Smith's Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience [2002]) and Inez Milholland (Linda J. Lumsden's Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland [2004]). 28

Ernestine Rose has a new and interesting biography (Bonnie S. Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer [2017]). I've also dug a little into biographies of lesser-known figures such as Lillie Devereux Blake (Grace Farrell's Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased [2002]), Belva Lockwood (Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President [2007]), and Emma Devoe (Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal's Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe [2011]). There are several new studies of Alice Paul (Mary Walton's A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot [2010], Christine Lunardini's Alice Paul: Equality for Women [2013], and Jill Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry's Alice Paul: Claiming Power [2014]), and one of Lucy Stone (Sally G. McMillan's Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life [2015]). I particularly note the absence from this list of books on working-class suffragists such as Leonora O'Reilly and Rose Schneiderman. There is now, however, a much-needed study of Mary Kenney O'Sullivan (Kathleen Nutter's The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 [2000]). 29

Two recent biographies have appeared (Lori D. Ginzberg's Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life [2009], and Vivian Gornick's The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton [2005]). With the publication of Ann D. Gordon's scrupulously edited and annotated six-volume Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1997–2013), hopefully more should be forthcoming. Also in the category of important biographical resources, Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar's incredible Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 has done spectacular work in using crowd sourcing to build biographical dictionaries of relatively unknown African American suffragists, Congressional Union/National Woman's party militants, and the moderates of Nawsa . 30

JAH: How have historians' approaches to women's suffrage and women and the vote evolved since this first effusion of scholarship? What, if anything, has changed in the early twenty-first century?

Gidlow : I see the last twenty-five-years or so of scholarship as having replaced a single dominant narrative that was constrained and bounded with a profusion of perspectives that transcend many of those limits. In its purest form, the classic interpretation treated the suffrage struggle as a self-contained American story that began in 1848 in Seneca Falls and, after many trials and tribulations, was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1920 by heroic middle-class and elite white women with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Scholarship, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s, chipped away at the temporal, geographical, racial, and class boundaries of the prevailing narrative through key works such as Ginzberg's Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (2005), Cott's “Across the Great Divide” (1990), Anderson's Joyous Greetings (2000), Terborg-Penn's African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote (1998), Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996), and DuBois's Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997). By the mid-2000s, the classic narrative gave way to bold new interpretations that borrowed insights from scholarship on historical memory, borders, and other fields. It was hardly possible to privilege 1848 after Tetrault's The Myth of Seneca Falls , or to see suffrage as a purely domestic political issue after Sneider's Suffragists in an Imperial Age . As the centennial of ratification approaches, more work is connecting woman suffrage to, or integrating it into, accounts of other key figures and issues in U.S. and global history, such as Charles Darwin and evolution (Kimberly A. Hamlin's From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America [2014]), and, in my own work, the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. These deep connections to other issues are powerful evidence, if any was needed, that “the” history of woman suffrage is not peripheral to national or transnational histories, but central and essential. 31

Katherine M. Marino : Numerous women's groups have pushed for the right to vote as one goal in multipronged and often-global platforms for birth control, labor rights, socialism, world peace, temperance, child welfare, freedom from sexual violence, antilynching legislation, and racial justice. Works that shine a light on the vital political work of African American women's rights activists that included and expanded beyond suffrage include Jones's All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman's Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (2013); Feimster's Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper's Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017); and Materson's For the Freedom of Her Race , in addition to already-named works by Terborg-Penn, Painter, and Giddings, and many others. 32

Vicki L. Ruiz's American Historical Review article on Luisa Capetillo and Luisa Moreno (“Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930”), Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011), Gabriela González's Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), and Emma Pérez's The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) have explored the political work of turn-of-the-century Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Latinx women who took up “the woman question” alongside other goals for the health, education, and safety of their communities. Works that demonstrate the interrelationship between suffrage organizing and international peace, labor, and socialist movements include Rupp's Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois's 1991 New Left Review essay “Woman Suffrage and the Left”; Julia L. Mickenberg's American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (2017) and her 2014 JAH article, “Suffragettes and Soviets”; Anderson's The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck's Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (1995); and Melissa R. Klapper's Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (2013), to name just a few. 33

These histories show us that suffrage was not one movement, but multiple movements. They also challenge the wave metaphor, showing us that U.S. feminism in the early twentieth century was not defined by a quest for the Nineteenth Amendment. At the same time, demands for political rights and equality have been an integral and ongoing part of U.S. feminisms.

These readings have also been useful for my own work on Pan-American feminism in the interwar years. On the heels of the Nineteenth Amendment, Anglo-American women, believing they were the global leaders of feminism because of their recent suffrage victory, sought to dictate the terms of feminism to their Latin American counterparts. U.S. leaders often instructed Latin American feminists to make a single-minded push for suffrage. However, Latin American feminists exerted their own broader meanings of feminismo , defined not only by equality under the law but also by social and economic rights, and anti-imperialism, among other goals. Anti-imperialism was a driver of suffrage activism in Latin America, especially in Central America, in the 1910s and 1920s. In the mid-1930s–1950s period, when suffrage passed in most Latin American countries, antifascism and Popular Front coalitions of socialist and labor groups vitally energized women's suffrage campaigns. This Popular Front Pan-American feminist movement was critical to developing frameworks for international human rights. It advocated a broad meaning of international human rights—for political, civil, social, and economic rights for men and women, and antidiscrimination based on race, sex, class, or religion—that it pushed into inter-American venues and eventually into the founding of the United Nations. In the Un , a group of Latin American feminists were critical to inserting women's rights in the founding 1945 Un Charter and to promoting the inclusion of both women's and human rights. This is just one example of how it can be useful to de-center the United States, while also keeping in mind the relationship between U.S. suffrage and imperial histories. 34

Dubois : I have been impressed with several clusters of recent scholarship. Political scientists are delving into the theoretical foundations of suffrage thought and the impact of enfranchisement on voting rates. Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (2016), by J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, uses sophisticated new techniques to assess how women voted in their first presidential elections. They break the vote down by state and region and thus offer an alternative to the oversimplified, long-standing, and unsubstantiated claim that women did not make use of their new voting rights. They and others have suggested that we pay attention to the role played in the political realignment of 1932 by the massive expansion of the electorate that the Nineteenth Amendment effected. Republicans had long claimed to be the party that supported woman suffrage, but that claim had grown very thin by the late 1920s. It is not without significance that while Herbert Hoover promised the first woman cabinet member, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the one who appointed her. 35

I noted in my first answer that working-class suffragism could use more research. By contrast, there is much fine scholarship on upper-class suffragism. In addition to Sylvia Hoffert's Belmont biography already noted, Johanna Neuman has written about “Gilded Age socialites” ( Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote , 2017), and Joan Marie Johnson has done very good work on suffrage philanthropy ( Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 , 2017). Somewhat related is Brooke Kroeger's work on male suffrage supporters ( The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote , 2017). Note that these last three books focus on New York suffragism, as does the work of Susan Goodier ( No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement [2017] and, coauthored with Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State [2017]). Almost every other state has yet to receive its own study, which will be of great help in understanding the grassroots of suffragism. 36

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu : I will focus on the value of citizenship, both for those excluded from eligibility and political rights due to race and immigration status as well as for those who had citizenship forced upon them by the U.S. Empire. These perspectives illuminate how whiteness and settler colonialism underlie so-called women's suffrage. I focus my comments primarily on Asian American and Pacific Islander women, although forms of racialized exclusion and forced colonization resonate more broadly.

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 happened just four years before the 1924 Immigration Act, which systematically codified earlier laws and court cases that denied Asian immigrants entry into the United States and deemed them “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This designation, a legal status that influenced social and cultural representations of Asian people in the United States, held implications not only for the right to vote but also for the right to serve on juries, own property, marry interracially, and so on. For Asian women, whose status was “covered” by that of their husbands or fathers, their alienness by association not only translated to distinctly gendered barriers at the border (where they were monitored for gender-inappropriate behavior and suspected of prostitution) but also affected their legal rights (U.S.-born women would lose their citizenship if they married men who were aliens ineligible for citizenship). The scholarship of Sucheng Chan, Martha Gardner, Judy Yung, and others reveal how U.S. citizenship fundamentally represented racialized and gendered privileges, which were out of grasp for those deemed forever foreign. This issue continues to be relevant, given the substantial undocumented population in the United States, including Asian Americans, the fastest growing segment of this community. 37

It is also important to note instances of forced incorporation into the U.S. Empire, which conferred the unwanted gift of unequal legal rights. As Allison Sneider, Kristin Hoganson, and others argue, the U.S. women's suffrage campaign blossomed in the contexts of U.S. westward expansion and overseas empire. White suffragists insisted on their political rights in response to U.S. colonial endeavors. As Susan B. Anthony stated in her 1902 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage, “I think we are of as much importance as are the Filipinos, Porto Ricans, Hawaiians, Cubans, and all of the different sorts of men that you have before you. When you get those men, you have an ignorant and unlettered people, who know nothing about our institutions.” As the U.S. expanded into the Caribbean and across the Pacific, Filipinos became “nationals,” neither citizens nor aliens. The last Native Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, was forcibly deposed by a coalition of white businessmen, U.S. military forces, and Christian missionary interests. Given this history of U.S. Empire, coerced inclusion, and racialized arguments for white women's suffrage, what is the value of attaining “equal” rights within an inherently unjust nation? 38

To help address these legacies of racial exclusion and imperial incorporation, I especially appreciate the work of Cathleen Cahill, whose forthcoming book focuses on women of color, particularly indigenous, Latina, and Asian/American women who advocated for suffrage. I'm also in awe of the substantial black women's suffrage project that Dublin and Sklar have launched as part of the Women and Social Movements in the United States journal. 39

I explore the ramifications of race and empire in a political biography of Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color U.S. congressional representative and the namesake for Title IX. Mink was elected from Hawaii and lived through the islands' transition from “territory” to “state.” She also articulated what I describe as a Pacific feminism. Mink's denizenship from islands in the middle of the Pacific framed how she understood political issues, ranging from Cold War militarism, race relations, environmentalism, and women's politics. The racial, the colonial, and the international were intertwined for Mink, a third-generation Japanese American, as they are for other racialized individuals who arrived on U.S. shores or whose homelands were crossed by U.S. borders. 40

Tetrault : I appreciate Judy Wu's reminder that extension of suffrage “rights” also implied colonization in the lives of many. In my reading about native and indigenous peoples voting “rights,” gaining citizenship and the vote meant the loss or diminishment of tribal sovereignty. We need to be careful not to reify the whiteness of the standard narrative by cheerfully adding additional dates—when native women “got” the vote, for example—or by treating voting as if it is always, on the face of it, desirable. The latter idea betrays a kind of triumphant American exceptionalism that often runs through discussions about voting “rights.” More work is needed here. Certainly, once enfranchised, colonized people creatively figure out how to leverage the ballot in their lives, for resistance and survival. And this too is an important part of the story. 41

Leila J. Rupp posed this question: Liette Gidlow's comments about the breakdown of a dominant narrative of suffrage as a self-contained and American story, along with Judy Wu's focus on the history of both systematic exclusion and imperialist incorporation of Asian and other women of color, raises for me these questions: Do we have anything to celebrate about the suffrage victory? Given the complicated history of suffrage that has emerged, are there positive developments we can point to regarding women's enfranchisement? What did women's votes bring to politics?

Gidlow : There is a sense that somehow the Nineteenth Amendment was rather a disappointment, that it doubled the electorate but didn't really change anything, in part because many women did not vote, and because those who did vote did not vote as a bloc. That is, that the Nineteenth Amendment did not produce a “women's vote.”

I argue, however, that over time a women's voting bloc did emerge, one that is cross-class and stable, with high voter turnout and a sharp preference for one party. That bloc emerged not among white women, but rather among African American women. It took the better part of a century, but by the early twenty-first century “the” black women's vote had become transformative in U.S. politics, just as southern white supremacists who had feared woman suffrage a century ago had feared.

The fear that the Anthony Amendment would enfranchise southern black women and open the door to the return of southern African American men to the polls was central to the debate over the Anthony Amendment in the late 1910s in Congress and in 1920 in Tennessee. In 1915 the Richmond ( Va ) Evening Journal editorialized that if the Anthony Amendment became law, “twenty-nine counties will go under negro rule,” a development that would force “the men of Virginia to return to defending white supremacy through fraud and violence” and “return to the slimepit from which we dug ourselves.” As I pointed out in a 2018 article in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , southern members of Congress routinely cited these concerns when they explained their opposition to sending the amendment to the states for ratification (“The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote”). Kimberley Hamlin develops evidence along these lines beautifully in her forthcoming book, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener . And Elaine Weiss's account of the ratification battle in Tennessee ( The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote , 2018) shows frequent recourse to the fear of black women's—and men's—votes. When black women showed up in the fall of 1920 to register and vote—and they did show up—local papers reported near panic at their surging interest. 42

In some locations, the sheer number of registrants suggests that the mobilization of black women voters was cross-class. A letter writer to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( Naacp ) noted that six hundred African American women tried to register in Caddo Parish, Louisiana—a breadth that suggests working-class mobilization—but that fewer than five succeeded, most of those, as the letter-writer states, “on account of “thair propity.” In Jacksonville, Florida, thanks to painstaking data collection by Paul Ortiz, we have direct evidence of cross-class mobilization ( Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 , 2005). There, the occupations with the most female registered voters were laundry workers, maids, and cooks, but the list of registrants also included dressmakers, clerks, and teachers. 43

Voter registrars employed a variety of strategies to disfranchise middle- and upper-class African American women. They had the discretion to decide how to test applicants and whether they had done well enough to pass. Class status alone did not secure voting rights for African American women in the South after ratification. Some black women turned then to gender-based strategies, trying to enlist the help of white women who had worked and sacrificed to enact woman suffrage. They quickly learned that there was little gender solidarity across racial lines. The two major suffrage groups ( Nawsa , reconstituted in the summer of 1920 as the League of Women Voters, and the National Woman's party) both declined to get involved. 44

Class-based strategies did not work, and gender-based strategies did not work, so African American women redoubled their efforts to push forward race-based strategies, working with African American men through the Naacp , churches, institutions of higher education, and other organizations. They attacked the white primary and made for themselves a place in the “Roosevelt” Democratic party. Women such as Ella Baker and Septima Clark developed educational programs that helped community members pass literacy tests. After the Voting Rights Act, despite ongoing resistance, they registered and mobilized en masse. Their votes made a difference; sometimes they made the difference. 45

It took the better part of a century, but the Nineteenth Amendment did produce a “women's vote.” Since at least the 1990s, African American women have displayed the most intense partisan preference of any demographic group. In 2008 and 2012, they had the highest voter turnout of any group and made crucial contribution to Barack Obama's historic presidential wins. When southern white supremacists opposed the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, they feared the power of black women's votes. A century later we can see that their fears were well-founded.

Marino : When I teach U.S. women's and gender history, I trouble the assumption that the Nineteenth Amendment was the major turning point that students sometimes assume it was. I ask my students to consider a question my adviser Estelle Freedman instilled in us: “Which women?”—Which women benefitted from the Nineteenth Amendment? As Judy Wu has pointed out, immigration restrictions meant that most Asian and Asian American women did not. Polling taxes, literacy requirements, and violence constricted citizenship rights for many African Americans in the South. The deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s further eroded men's and women's citizenship rights. Relatedly, the racism of white suffrage organizations, their use of U.S. imperial expansion as justification for a federal suffrage amendment, and their failure to organize intersectionally in the wake of suffrage, challenge the notion that the Nineteenth Amendment was a major turning point. 46

At the same time, I also emphasize that movements for suffrage were extremely important in chipping away at the legal exclusion of women from political citizenship, and that suffrage demands were a key part of broader movements that upheld multiple goals. To understand the stakes of women's suffrage it helps to realize that figures as diverse and as radical as Sojourner Truth, Clara Zetkin, Ida B. Wells, and Jovita Idár were demanding it and to great effect. One example: In 1913, the same year she rejected white suffragists' instructions to march at the end of the Washington, D.C., parade, Wells founded the first African American suffrage organization in Chicago, the Alpha Suffrage Club. That club registered over seven thousand new African American women voters who helped elect the city's first black alderman. It is important to understand that Wells's suffrage and electoral activism was connected to her activism against lynching and sexual violence. 47

Tetrault : I appreciate Liette Gidlow's deft summary of the field: from a dominant, contained narrative to a profusion of narratives that can no longer be contained and now spill over into so many other stories. At the same time, this centennial is causing quite a bit of confusion, as the old, contained narrative of the Nineteenth Amendment extending the “right to vote” to women keeps intruding onto how we now brand the amendment. I think the conventional story has contributed negatively in unseen ways to understandings of American history, by lulling (often white) Americans into believing that a “right to vote” exists. Historians constantly refer to suffrage activism as women pursuing and then winning “the right to vote.” That framing enshrines this right as something that has been realized, when it has not. It's no surprise, then, that a majority of white Americans today think that voter suppression is not currently underway, even as it is sharply on the rise. 48

Bringing the text of the Nineteenth Amendment into anniversary discussions helps us see a place where we are still getting tripped up by older, inherited—and triumphant—narratives. When the amendment was drafted in 1878 it might have been worded affirmatively, as a directive: the federal government shall protect the right of women to the elective franchise. But it wasn't, owing to complicated factors. Instead, the Nineteenth Amendment, like the Fifteenth Amendment upon which it was modeled, is negatively worded. The Fifteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “race,” while the Nineteenth Amendment says states can't bar voting on grounds of “sex.” The Nineteenth Amendment doesn't enfranchise anyone directly. It works indirectly, by removing the word “male” from state constitutions, where voting qualifications were defined. That's it. It's true that the opening of the short, thirty-nine-word amendment (like the Fifteenth Amendment) references a “right to vote,” but that right did not, in fact, exist. It's an illusory referent point, something the amendment leaves imagined rather than demanded. The Constitution leaves the appointment of voters up to individual states. It does not contain the right to vote.

Leading white suffragists could have seen how flaccid the Fifteenth Amendment turned out to be in protecting black men's votes, as southern states legally disfranchised them on other grounds—something permitted by the very narrow and negative wording of that amendment. Yet, even as the shortcomings of the Fifteenth Amendment became clear over the 1880s and 1890s, neither Stanton nor Anthony, nor any other suffragists, sought to revise the text of the proposed federal amendment. They left it modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, even as that amendment crumbled before them.

This wording is, I think, a concession to American racism. Historians talk about the amendment's effect but rarely about its creation. Stanton, in particular, had always believed that voting should be extended to the “educated” and kept from the “ignorant” (read, immigrants and many folks of color). Stanton supported discrimination in voting, and the amendment ultimately made allowances for that (explored in my current work). Future, mainstream white suffragists made these same allowances by not revising the amendment's text.

Removing “male” from state-defined voter qualifications, by declaring that requirement unconstitutional, was a huge victory, particularly in an era when discrimination on the grounds of sex was thought not only permissible but also necessary given that women and men were understood to be vastly different biological entities. But how can we tell a story today that doesn't falsely enshrine a “right to vote” and still honor this amendment? There, I think, we still have work to do.

Finally, that we still narrate the mainstream suffrage story as a story of the federal amendment is, I think, another legacy of the earlier dominant narrative that centers Stanton and Anthony. The federal amendment was their baby, but many other suffragists—especially in the forgotten American Woman Suffrage Association—thought it was unconstitutional, because the Constitution clearly gave authority over voting to the states, something not discussed in references to their promotion of a state strategy.

When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, women were already voting, in some form, in all but eight states. We have very little history of how women on the ground, including women of color, were trying to create and safeguard a “right” to a ballot. What we do know is that we can't talk about women's first election as if it happened after 1920; millions of women were already voting before then.

If we broaden our focus beyond the federal amendment, we see that there is no single date when women gained ballot access. This is a more accurate, if a much less satisfying, story.

Dubois : It bears emphasis that the wording of the amendment that Lisa critiques was offered by senators, not by Stanton and Anthony. Through much of the 1870s, Stanton and Anthony advocated affirmative wording linking women's voting to universal national suffrage, but that phrasing received no support in Congress.

Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment? I must say that I honestly don't understand how this question can be asked and so how to answer it. Perhaps it is intended as a productive provocation. Nonetheless, my strong position is that any significant political goal that women wished to achieve, any effort to effect social change for women or for the larger society, could not be secured without the fundamental tool of democratic society, the franchise. Would we want to envision a counterfactual history in which American women would wait, like the women of France, Italy, Mexico, Belgium, and many other countries, until after the Second World War to vote? Nor can we reasonably claim that these, or our, or virtually any other national enfranchisements of women could have occurred without the often-long-running, organized demands by women themselves.

The Fifteenth Amendment certainly did not secure African American men's right to vote against attack and required another century of struggle to fully reinstate it. Nonetheless, I doubt any of us would think it a better outcome if de jure suffrage rights had not been won during Reconstruction. In the modern world, where even autocratic leaders must make use of the popular vote, no one except an occasional far-right pundit seeking attention seriously asks whether women's enfranchisement should have happened. Women's votes are such a rich prize that all sides fight furiously to claim them.

Gidlow : Voting is hardly the whole story of American democracy and political participation. But there is a singular quality to enfranchisement because it certifies the enfranchised person's status as a legitimate decision maker in civic affairs. (Judith Shklar's classic 1991 work, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion , is so valuable here.) The imprimatur of official status matters, even if the act of voting does not achieve all we might wish. This is not to say that the import of enfranchisement is merely symbolic. When women cast votes, they are helping make decisions that everyone, including men, must abide. This power remains deeply contested, in politics and well beyond, even a century after ratification. 49

Jones : Should we celebrate the Nineteenth Amendment anniversary? I don't think “celebration” is a historian's approach to the past—it leans too far in the direction of hagiography for my tastes. I don't even think, as I've written elsewhere, that commemoration is the work of historians. On this point I am indebted to Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his devastating analysis of the 1992 “celebration” of Christopher Columbus in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995). Anniversary dates are an opportunity to teach history to a broader public. Some of what we teach may encourage or fuel commemoration or celebration. But if we give in to the tug of mythmaking and sanitization that these sort of rituals require, we are doing something else. 50

JAH: In what ways have histories of women and the vote contributed to our broader understanding of U.S. history? What difference has this work made to the field at large?

Dubois : Regarding the beginning and end of the suffrage period, historians of the United States have done a modestly good job of paying attention to suffrage historiography. By beginning, I mean from the period of antislavery activism to the Reconstruction era, 1836–1876. The abolitionist origins of women's rights and the controversy surrounding woman suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment have both drawn historians' attention. I recently noticed a very good law review article by Adam Winkler on the suffrage New Departure, which made an innovative constitutional argument for women's enfranchisement largely based on the Fourteenth Amendment, as an early and underappreciated episode in the reenvisioning of the Constitution as a “living document,” an approach not recognized by virtually any jurists at the time (“A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” 2001). By end, I mean the Progressive Era, 1900–1920. Women's political activism in those years is so central to the social welfare dimension of state and national policies, it is hard to ignore. 51

The middle period of suffrage activism has not been integrated into general U.S. history for two reasons. First, suffrage historiography is weak in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, perhaps because there is little suffrage radicalism to inspire modern students of the movement. Second, U.S. history overall is weak in this period, with no consensus on how to narrate the era, or even what to call it: the age of class division, the age of industrialization, the woman's era, the Gilded Age, the racial nadir, post-Reconstruction reaction?

Jones : One approach to this question is to ask more directly: How have histories of women's suffrage contributed to our understanding of women's politics and power? Once we do, at least two important things happen. First, our attention is drawn away from so-called women's suffrage associations, and we focus on sites where black women were struggling over their political rights and power. This is why, for example, the Ann D. Gordon's edited collection African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (1997) ranges from the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women to the Voting Rights Act. That volume examines black women not only in suffrage associations but also throughout African American public culture: in the colored convention movement, antislavery societies, churches, the antilynching movement, the club movement, and more. To answer the question directly, the history of women's suffrage (and its shortcomings) encouraged historians of black women to rewrite the histories of black public culture as histories of women and to better understand the full range of how and where women's politics unfolded. 52

Today, in the field of African American women's history, a great deal of important work is being done on women's politics and power, but not very much of this work focuses on the history of suffrage or of voting more generally. This stands in contrast to the great interest in contemporary voter suppression, treated in Carol Anderson's excellent One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Still, we don't think of the era before the Nineteenth Amendment as one of “voter suppression” even as many black women were barred from the polls as women after the Civil War. The histories that stick closest to black women and the vote are those that are most concerned with black women's intellectual history, such as Cooper's Beyond Respectability and Treva Lindsey's Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (2017). 53

African American women's history opens up onto of a set of questions, we might even say a skepticism, about political histories that center too firmly on the vote, political parties, and the state. The vast, ubiquitous, and enduring ways racism and white supremacy have been woven into people, ideas, and institutions have required that the field always understand how black Americans critiqued and then worked against racism and white supremacy. That is to say that an essential counterpoint to histories of the vote are histories of how voting was not enough.

I see the exciting new work on black women's internationalism as the cutting edge of new histories of politics and power. Examples include Keisha N. Blain's Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018) and the volume edited by Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019). These histories defy conventional frameworks such as that of the nation-state or of electoral politics. As Grace V. Leslie's essay in that collection (“‘United, We Build a Free World,’”) illustrates, even a figure such as Mary McLeod Bethune, whom I associate with the National Association of Colored Women and Fdr 's “black cabinet,” must be remembered for her broad political vision, which included a critique of racism and colonialism and was aimed at linking women across the black diaspora. The vantage point of this work dovetails importantly with that of Marino's new Feminism for the Americas . 54

Has the history of black women and the vote remade U.S. political history? The answer is yes and no, and perhaps that is just right. Certainly we have made the case for black women in mainstream politics—from suffrage to the vote, parties, and the state. We've helped expand the notion of political history by making the case for insurgent politics as part of the American story. And we've even pressed on the geographies of political history, insisting on a politics rooted in the United States but transnational in its vision and its aims.

Marino : Histories of women's politics have, on a fundamental level, contributed to a recognition that to understand politics or political citizenship, we need to understand gender, race, class, and ethnicity, among other hierarchies of power. Decades of scholarship have shown that these areas of focus are not separate. (Women's and gender histories, however, too often still get tokenized.)

To point to a few useful contributions, Paula Baker's 1984 AHR essay, “The Domestication of Politics,” demonstrated that a changing understanding of what counted as “politics” in the United States was wrought by women's Progressive Era civil and social engagement and by a burgeoning welfare state. This “domestication” of politics abetted the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. More recently, Dawn Langan Teele's book, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (2018), provides a fine-grained comparative analysis of how women's suffrage was accomplished in England, France, and the United States. It underscores the importance of strategic maneuverings and alliances between suffragists and political parties seeking to gain power. Blain's Set the World on Fire not only explores the range of black nationalist women's engagements in the United States and transnationally around a range of goals but it also places women at the center of black nationalism. 55

These histories have also increasingly demonstrated that the “personal” is indeed “political.” Freedman's Redefining Rape argues that the definition of rape—including the race-, class-, and gender-specific notions of who can perpetuate it and who be a victim of it—is fundamental to political citizenship. Her book underscores the connections between sexual violence, gender, race, the vote, and broad meanings of political citizenship. “Suffrage” is in the subtitle, and she examines a diverse group of female and male activists, black and white, including suffragists from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century who sought to expand the definition of “rape” beyond the typical one of this period: a forcible attack on a chaste white woman by a nonwhite male perpetrator. The book explores the importance of women's voting power at the state and national levels to the passage of statutory rape laws. It also explains how the right to serve on a jury for white women and African American men and women was critical both to addressing sexual violence and to changing this narrow definition. 56

As Freedman's work indicates, race and class often divided women's efforts. Although some white women sought to curb white male patriarchy, many more white suffragists sought to, in Freedman's words “empower white women.” Some, such as the southern temperance activist and suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton, allied with forces that encouraged lynching black men to “protect white womanhood.” Feimster explores Felton in great depth in her excellent book Southern Horrors , which also centrally explores Ida B. Wells's antilynching activism and work for the protection of African American women. Feimster's book illuminates the history of women's engagement around sexual violence, lynching, and political power, while also shedding light more broadly on the history of race and politics of the postbellum United States. 57

Another bourgeoning body of scholarship has underscored the centrality of white women's political power to the rise of the New Right, modern conservatism, and modern white supremacist and antifeminist politics. These works include Catherine E. Rymph's Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (2006); Michelle M. Nickerson's Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012); and Elizabeth Gillespie McRae's Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (2018). Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (2017) highlights women's feminist and antifeminist activism around the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, a key moment when debates over the body, sexuality, reproduction, and “the family” fostered schisms that continue to shape our political landscape today. 58

Gidlow : Women's enfranchisement has not shaped the development of broad narratives in and beyond U.S. history nearly as much as it could. Historians searching for short-term results of women's new power to vote have generally been disappointed. The Nineteenth Amendment did not usher in a new and powerful wave of progressive reform. Former suffragists in the 1920s remained as divided as they were before ratification, now over questions of the equal rights amendment and labor protections. Lots of women failed to cast ballots. In short, the Nineteenth Amendment seems to have landed with a thud.

Looking for the effects of women's enfranchisement over a longer time frame, however, may suggest other questions historians might fruitfully pursue. How did various political institutions respond to the fact of women's enfranchisement, whether or not women actually could or did vote? For example, did women's enfranchisement contribute to the trend that Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter once called “politics by other means”—that is, the twentieth-century shift of decision making out of bodies that were directly accountable to voters to bureaucracies that are more insulated from the electorate ( Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America , 1990)? Or, here's another: Once women had the vote, what happened to white men's privileged status as civic actors? If they lost some of that status, did they shore up their civic privilege in other ways? If they retained it, how did they do that? 59

In my own work on southern African American women's efforts to vote in the 1920s and beyond, I argue that the successes and the failures of aspiring southern African American voters in the 1920s, women but also men, resonated through the decades and helped change the American political landscape in important ways. Their surge to the polls after ratification triggered violent reprisals and helped fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan. Their interest in voting forced a feeble southern Republican party to affirm its identity as a white party, laying the groundwork for the late twentieth-century realignment of southern white voters that made the Republican party dominant in the region by the 1980s. The failures of white former suffragists in the National Woman's party and the League of Women Voters to stand up for southern black women's voting rights cast a shadow long enough to darken the prospects for a truly collaborative women's liberation movement across the color line five decades later. 60

Wu : These questions are particularly relevant for my current work, a biography of a woman of color political advocate who very much believed in the promise and potential of political liberalism. I envision Patsy Mink trying to dismantle or at least significantly renovate the master's house with the master's tools. Mink's strategy of full inclusion and transformation, however, also exists in tension with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander efforts to critique U.S. empire and Asian American settler colonialism. Full inclusion in the U.S. state meant continued occupation. For example, the campaign for statehood in Hawaii, which Mink advocated, foreclosed the possibility of independence for Hawaii. Asian Americans, although discriminated against in the plantation economy and the political state, nevertheless gained economic and political power that contributed to the dispossession of Native Hawaiians. Their status led Haunani-Kay Trask to describe Asian Americans as settlers who came to steal and take. Jodi Byrd distinguishes between “arrivants,” those who arrived as racialized subjects, and settlers. However, Dean Saranillio reminds us that being an “arrivant” does not absolve one of the responsibilities of challenging the settler state. 61

The tensions between racial/gender inclusion and settler colonialism remind me of two sets of conversations related to women's political rights. First, the political scientists Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes have identified three different formulations of women's citizenship: formal, descriptive, and substantive citizenship ( Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective , 2017). Formal representation asks: Do women have the same rights as men to participate in politics? Descriptive representation asks: Does access to equal rights result in equal representation in terms of numbers? And substantive representation asks: Are women's interests being advocated in the political arena? Formal representation (the right to vote) clearly does not result in descriptive representation. The year 2018 marked record numbers of women in Congress: 102 women in the House and 25 in the Senate. Nearly one hundred years after the passage of suffrage, women constitute not quite 25 percent of the elected representatives in Congress and still have not cracked the glass ceiling of the White House. Despite these numbers, women and their allies have been able to secure legislation that addresses issues fundamentally important to women. Formal representation, coupled with a range of political strategies, could lead to substantive representation, despite the lack of descriptive representation. However, I look forward to the day when women might obtain proportionate representation to their demographics in the country. 62

Second, another way to consider why voting matters is to focus on the gendered and racialized process by which subjects of empire become subjects of republics. The works of Carole Pateman ( The Sexual Contract , 1988), Christine Keating ( Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India , 2011), and others emphasize the gendered dimensions of racialized state formation. Pateman argues that men who engage in political contracts to form democratic states also tended to reinforce a “hidden sexual contract” that affirms patriarchy. Keating argues that decolonizing states that transition political power from a white colonial elite to a nonwhite “native” male population may nevertheless reinforce gender, religious, and ethnic/racial hierarchies as a form of “compensatory domination.” Various postcolonial feminist scholars have pointed out how “native” women are overdetermined as symbols of the purity of home, nation, and culture as the political economies of developing nations “modernize.” These “hidden sexual contracts,” “compensatory [forms of] democracy,” and the privatization and valorization of womanhood create historical patterns of gendered political exclusion for decolonizing nations. 63

Scholars who focus on women's political exclusions and engagements have made multiple contributions to U.S. and global histories. I am struck by the continued resistance of those who persist in ignoring or tokenizing this scholarship. I'd like to quote Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress, advocating for federal funding for the 1977 National Women's Conference ( Nwc ). The supporters of the Nwc battled to receive $5 million, approximately 4 cents for every woman in the United States at the time. Female legislators constituted 4 percent of the House and 0 percent of the Senate in 1976, the U.S. bicentennial year. As Chisholm reminded her legislative colleagues, “I really do sincerely hope that the gentlemen will, for once in their lives, as this country approaches its 200th anniversary, realize that 51 percent or 52 percent of the population is a very important segment of the population.” I hope our historian colleagues will also keep these demographics in mind as they write lectures, assign readings, as well as make hiring and promotion decisions. 64

JAH: In this Interchange, we have looked back over the field of women's suffrage activism and enfranchisement. Before we close, let's look ahead. What gaps or holes remain to be filled in the history and historiographies of women and the vote? What do we have left to learn?

Rupp : There is still more to learn about how many and which women voted, how they voted, and why they voted the way they did, although I understand the difficulties of researching these questions. What might a systematic history of women's voting behavior tell us? Did antisuffrage women vote? Were those who thought women would vote the same way as their husbands, if they had them, right? When thinking of women and voting, it is difficult not to think of the contemporary question—Why did 53 percent of white women vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election?

We also need to know much more about the impact of the final years of the suffrage movement on subsequent rounds of mobilization of all kinds of women's movements. We know that, among transnationally organized women, the winning of the vote in some places divided the movement into suffrage “haves” and “have-nots,” with consequences for debate about what were the most important issues for organizations to target. Should the movement move on to what the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance called “Equal Citizenship?” The International Woman's Suffrage Alliance in the 1920s took up the issue of women losing their citizenship if they married a noncitizen and the double standard of morality, and divided over the question of whether protective labor legislation for women was discriminatory. Increasingly, however, its focus turned to peace. 65

What did the winning of suffrage mean nationally, especially regarding social movement realignment? We know about the transformation of suffrage organizations into the League of Women Voters and the National Woman's party, but how did the Nineteenth Amendment affect the organized black women Martha Jones discusses, women in the labor movement, women in the peace movement, women in right-wing movements, and so many others?

Tetrault : We need to jettison the 1848–1920 framework and begin to tie this history to other dates and other developments. Only then can this rich and complicated history begin to grow into itself.

As just a few examples, Martha Jones has shown how important it was for churchwomen to be advocating for the vote inside their churches, as early as the 1870s, yet this is still not a conventional piece of suffrage history (“Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” 2005). Lori Ginzberg ( Untidy Origins ) and now Dawn Winters (“‘The Ladies Are Coming!’: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism,” 2018) have shown that women were petitioning for the vote in 1846. In Winters's work that demand was coming out of temperance, not abolition, upending the standard narrative. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, when most women became enfranchised, was legislation that women fought for, alongside men. Vast expanses before and after 1920 are begging to be connected to this story, which will surely reposition 1920 as important, but not definitive. Meanwhile, without a positive assertion of the right to vote in our Constitution, voter disfranchisement proceeds apace, especially since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. This story is, in fact, multiple stories, with multiple antecedents, and it is far from over. 66

Marino : I would like to make a special plug for U.S. historians to do more research outside the United States. Engaging seriously with histories of women's voting rights outside the United States promises not only to shed light on post-1920 activism, including that of women of color and women in the labor and peace movements, but also to stretch our understandings of what is politically possible. Exploring these histories would de-center the idea that the United States or Western Europe “invented” feminism and challenge U.S.-exceptionalist understandings of voting activism and feminism globally.

In my research on Latin American histories of suffrage, I have investigated frente popular (popular front groups) in Latin America, which were social movements, often electoral coalitions of political parties. Many of them believed that including women in the electorate would enhance frente popular political power nationally. In the 1930s and 1940s, these groups aligned with multiple causes: a new inter-American labor movement, the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, Puerto Rican independence, solidarity with Ethiopia after Italy's invasion, antiracism, and, because of the power of inter-American feminism, women's rights, including women's voting rights. Popular front groups in Latin America had strong ties to labor activists and peace activists in the United States, and to women of color. These groups were aware of the antifeminism of right-wing dictatorships throughout the world. 67

Women's suffrage legislation passed throughout Latin America in the years after World War II, many times after new governments had overthrown dictatorships, often thanks to antifascist women's long-standing activism and international decrees such as the 1945 United Nations Charter and 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I'm currently researching Felicia Santizo, an Afro-Panamanian feminist and educator. A leading suffragist from the 1920s through 1930s, Santizo called for universal suffrage without race, class, or sex restrictions, which was adopted in Panama's 1946 constitution. She also organized an important new antifascist women's group that focused on school lunches for impoverished children and child and adult literacy programs. She later became a leader of the Partido del Pueblo (the communist party of Panama), which had vital transnational connections, including with the Women's International Democratic Federation.

Relatedly, it's important to continue interrogating how U.S. international suffrage debates mapped onto global empire. U.S. occupations in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines utilized the idea that U.S. political culture was superior because of the supposed “freedoms” given to U.S. women. More research could be done in diplomatic and foreign relations archives to complement existing works on this topic. We still know more about British and French imperial feminism than about U.S. imperial feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Doing this work continues the project Leila Rupp laid out for us in Worlds of Women , of interrogating “who's in” and “who's out” of these international networks and how language, class, race, nation, among other categories, shaped these boundaries. 68

Language provides a particularly rich lens through which we can analyze transnational and imperial feminisms. I recently found that the Spanish feminist María Espinosa expressed outrage, in her 1920 book, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation), that the International Alliance of Women had asked Spanish suffragists to host a conference in Spain but refused to include Spanish as an official language. Espinosa invoked a Pan-Hispanism that expressed solidarity with Latin America. At the same time, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-speaking feminists were often imperialist in their own ways. They often excluded women who spoke indigenous languages. 69

From Tetrault's book The Myth of Seneca Falls I learned more about the founding of the International Council of Women by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1888. These large Euro-American-led organizations (the International Alliance of Women and International Council of Women) inspired feminists around the world, but they also forwarded the idea that Anglo-American leaders invented feminism. It would be useful to explore the reverberations of that idea. U.S. and Western European feminists' pretentions to superiority often encouraged women's groups in various parts of the world to ally with each other more strongly in opposition to empire. 70

These insights connect to points made in Tetrault's book and by Martha Jones when she invoked Trouillot's Silencing the Past . We need to continue thinking critically about who had the power and the resources to create the archives and to tell the story. We should consider how inequalities in historical preservation along lines of class and race, and between the “global North” and “global South,” have deeply shaped our historical understandings. Exploring transnational movements and non-U.S. histories sheds light on the vital work of activists and groups that did not always have the ability to create archives (or whose archives are not as easily accessible to U.S. researchers). They also help us de-center a history of feminism that places the United States, and Anglo-American players specifically, at the forefront, and avoid what the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story.” 71

Dubois : I would identify three areas of future research. The most obvious is to dig into local records (starting with the History of Woman Suffrage ) to examine activism at the rank-and-file level. How will the interests and arguments of those involved, and the political activities at these levels, challenge or enlarge what we claim about the movement when we study national leaders and major state and city environments? Just as historians of the women's liberation movement have shown that New York City and Boston feminism is in no way representative of the national range of activism, so too can we do similar work for suffrage activism.

The second direction that I would like to see explored more closely are the devices used by national, state, and even local politicians to oppose woman suffrage demands. Suffrage historians have tended to look at factors internal to the suffrage movement to explain slow progress and repeated defeats. But the more I look, in virtually every period, suffragists confronted the deliberate mobilization of good old-fashioned political opposition. Doing this work will deepen historians' sense of suffrage as a genuinely political movement, using political tools.

Finally, I look forward to increasing scholarship on the post-1920 years and on the impact (or lack thereof) of the Nineteenth Amendment. Recently political scientists have begun the important work of digging into voting activity in the first two or three postsuffrage elections, with excellent results. We know southern African American women faced powerful tools of disfranchisement. What else can we learn? I would especially like to see more work done on the impact of women's enfranchisement on the dramatic political shift, four presidential elections later, from which emerged the modern Democratic party and the Roosevelt New Deal. Surely the doubling of the electorate had an impact.

Wu : As a scholar invested in analyzing immigration, race, and empire, I am interested in what histories of the long suffrage movement (before and after 1920, in and beyond U.S. national boundaries) might reveal about the meaning and practice of democracy. How is the political right to vote linked to or distinct from cultural and economic forms of citizenship? How does women's suffrage reinforce U.S. exceptionalism and justify settler colonialism and militarism? And, how do various women who occupy a range of marginal and privileged statuses simultaneously, due to intersecting forms of social hierarchy, position themselves to claim political power? I look forward to new scholarship to help us understand the complex relationship between suffrage, citizenship, and the nation-state.

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965); Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (Boston, 1967); Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967); Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: The Origins of American Feminism—The Woman and the City, 1800–1860 (New York, 1978); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978).

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's dissertation had wide impact for years before the book appeared. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage” (Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1977); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998).

Susan D. Becker, The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism between the Wars (Westport, 1981); Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley, 1988); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York, 1987).

Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton, 1997), 48; Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York, 2008); Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, 2019).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Mari Jo Buhle, Women American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, 1981); Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976). Ellen DuBois, “The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” Feminist Studies , 3 (Autumn 1975), 63–71.

Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 836–62; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984); Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Right to Vote .

Buhle, Women and American Socialism ; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986); Diane Balser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston, 1987); Carole Turbin, Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864–1886 (Urbana, 1992); Susan Levine, Labor's True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia, 1984).

Flexner, Century of Struggle ; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Terborg-Penn, “Afro-Americans in the Struggle for Woman Suffrage”; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., Rochester, 1881–1922). Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill, 2014).

Giddings, When and Where I Enter , unpaginated front matter.

Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill, 2007).

DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York, 1998); Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage .

Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996). Nell Irvin Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's Knowing and Becoming Know,” Journal of American History , 81 (Sept. 1994), 461–92.

Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1998); Melanie Gustafson, Kristie Miller, and Elisabeth Israels Perry, eds., We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 (Albuquerque, 1999); Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996).

Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture , 7 (Fall 1994), 107–46; Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women's Political History, 1865–1880,” in African-American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 66–99. Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History , 74 (Dec. 1987), 863–83. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Victoria Hattam, “Economic Visions and Political Strategies: American Labor and the State, 1865–1896,” in Studies in American Political Development , 4 (Spring 1990), 82–129; Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993).

Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review , 89 (June 1984), 620–47; Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983); Sarah Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991). Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review , 91 (Dec. 1986), 1053–75; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs , 17 (Winter 1992), 251–74. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere , ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 109–43; Joseph R. Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order (Chicago, 1981); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana, 1980). Warren I. Sussman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1971); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1993); Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1972).

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003); Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom's Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill, 2009); Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent ; Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, 1998); Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911 (Detroit, 1994). H. M. Parkhurst, Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866 (New York, 1866), 46.

Painter, Sojourner Truth .

Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Catherine Clinton, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (New York, 2004); Kate Clifford Larson, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (New York, 2004); Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington, 1987).

Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York, 2009); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York, 2008).

Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (New Haven, 2013); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill, 2002); Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill, 2017); Sherie M. Randolph, Florynce “Flo” Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical (Chapel Hill, 2015).

Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (New York, 2013); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana, 1999); Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York, 2018).

Sylvia Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights (Bloomington, 2011); Trisha Franzen, Anna Howard Shaw: The Work of Woman Suffrage (Urbana, 2014); Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely ; Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race (Urbana, 2013); Joyce A. Hanson, Mary McLeod Bethune: Black Women's Political Activism (Columbia, Mo., 2013); Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience (Helena, 2002); Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland (Bloomington, 2004).

Bonnie S. Anderson, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (New York, 2017); Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing Life Erased (Amherst, Mass., 2002); Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York, 2007); Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe (Seattle, 2011); Mary Walton, A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York, 2010); Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (Philadelphia, 2013); J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York, 2014); Sally G. McMillan, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York, 2015); Kathleen Nutter, The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O'Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892–1912 (New York, 2000).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009); Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking about Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 2005); Ann D. Gordon, ed., Selected Letters of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (6 vols., New Brunswick, 1997–2013); Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 , http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/ .

Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, 2005); Nancy F. Cott, “Across the Great Divide: Women in Politics before and after 1920,” in Women, Politics, and Change , ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), 153–76; Anderson, Joyous Greetings ; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote ; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow ; Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, 1997); Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls ; Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014).

Jones, All Bound Up Together ; Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); Feimster, Southern Horrors ; Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana, 2017); Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900–1930,” American Historical Review , 121 (Feb. 2016), 1–16; Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin, 2011); Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York, 2018); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, 1999); Rupp, Worlds of Women ; Ellen DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review (no. 186, March–April, 1991), 20–45; Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (Chicago, 2017); Julia L. Mickenberg, “Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia,” Journal of American History , 100 (March 2014), 1021–51; Anderson, Rabbi's Atheist Daughter ; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890–1940 (New York, 2013).

Katherine M. Marino, “Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944,” Journal of Women's History , 26 (Summer 2014), 63–87; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht, Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal (New York, 2016).

Hoffert, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont ; Johanna Neuman, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women's Right to Vote (New York, 2017); Joan Marie Johnson, Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870–1967 (Chapel Hill, 2017); Brooke Kroeger, The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Albany, N.Y., 2017); Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-suffrage Movement (Urbana, 2017); Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (Ithaca, 2017).

Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia, 1991); Martha Gardner, The Qualities of Citizens: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, 2005); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995).

Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Susan B. Anthony quoted in Kristin Hoganson, “‘As Badly off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women's Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women's History , 13 (Summer 2001), 17.

Cathleen D. Cahill, Raising Our Banners: Women of Color Challenge the Mainstream Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill, forthcoming, 2020); Dublin and Sklar, Women and Social Movements in the United States .

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, The First Woman of Color in Congress: Patsy Takemoto Mink's Politics of Peace, Justice, and Feminism (New York, forthcoming).

Jeanette Wolfley, “Jim Crow, Indian Style: The Disenfranchisement of Native Americans,” American Indian Law Review , 16 (no. 1, 1991), 167–202; Jennifer L. Robinson, “The Right to Vote: A History of Voting Rights and American Indians,” in Minority Voting in the United States , ed. Kyle Kreider and Thomas Baldino (Santa Barbara, 2015); Daniel McCool, Susan M. Olson, and Jennifer L. Robinson, Native Vote: American Indians, the Voting Rights Act, and the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Eng., 2007).

Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), 128; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 17 (July 2018), 433–49. Kimberly Hamlin, Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (New York, forthcoming, 2020); Elaine Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (New York, 2018). “Disfranchisement in Congress,” Crisis , 4 (Feb. 1921), 165.

T. G. Garrett to “The N.A.A.C.P.,” Oct. 30, 1920, Records of the Naacp (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2005).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Clubwomen and Electoral Politics in the 1920s,” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 , ed. Ann D. Gordon and Bettye Collier-Thomas (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 150; Mrs. Lawrence Lewis to the Editor, Nation , March 26, 1921.

Charron, Freedom's Teacher ; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement ; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York, 1976).

On the connections between U.S. empire, race, and suffrage, see, for instance, Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age ; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Enfranchasing Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race , ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, 1998), 41–56; Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism, and Democracy (London, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai'i, 1888 to 1902,” in Women's Suffrage in Asia , ed. Edwards and Roces, 220–39; Rumi Yamusake, “Re-franchising Women of Hawai'i, 1912–1920: The Politics of Gender, Sovereignty, Race, and Rank at the Crossroads of the Pacific,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World , ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden, 2017), 114–39; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998); Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourse: Links between the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe , 5 (Spring 1993), 9–34; and Laura Prieto, “A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , 12 (April 2013), 199–233.

On the Alpha Suffrage Club work and voter registration, see Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1970), 346; Giddings, Ida , 523–46; Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, Mass., 2019), 99–110; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote , 139–40; and Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race .

Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression Is Warping American Democracy,” Atlantic , July 17, 2018.

Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Michel-Roph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995).

Adam Winkler, “A Revolution Too Soon: Woman Suffragists and the ‘Living Constitution,’” New York University Law Review , 76 (Nov. 2001), 1456–1526.

Ann D. Gordon, ed., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst, Mass., 1997).

Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (New York, 2018); Cooper, Beyond Respectability ; Treva Lindsey, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C . (Urbana, 2017).

Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia, 2018); Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds., To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana, 2019); Grace V. Leslie, “‘United, We Build a Free World’: The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” ibid. , 192–218; Marino, Feminism for the Americas .

Baker, “Domestication of Politics”; Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (Princeton, 2018); Blain, Set the World on Fire .

Freedman, Redefining Rape .

Feimster, Southern Horrors .

Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill, 2006); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton, 2012); Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York, 2018); Marjorie J. Spruill, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics (New York, 2017).

Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America (New York, 1990).

Liette Gidlow, “More than Double: African American Women and the Rise of a ‘Women's Vote,’ Journal of Women's History , 32 (Spring 2020).

Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1999); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, 2011); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood (Durham, N.C., 2018).

Pam Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes, Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective (2007; Los Angeles, 2017).

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988); Christine Keating, Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India (University Park, 2011). See also Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1999). Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, 1991); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C., 2003).

Shirley Chisholm, “Providing for a National Women's Conference,” Congressional Record—House , Dec. 10, 1975, H12201-2, folder 7, box 562, Patsy T. Mink Papers (Manuscript Division). These remarks are also available at Congressional Record , 94 Cong., 1 sess., Dec. 10, 1975, p. 39719.

On the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance and “equal citizenship,” see Rupp, Worlds of Women .

Martha S. Jones, “Overthrowing the ‘Monopoly of the Pulpit’: Race and the Rights of Church Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, 2010), 121–43; Ginzberg, Untidy Origins ; Dawn Winters, “The Ladies Are Coming!”: A New History of Antebellum Temperance, Women's Rights, and Political Activism” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2018); Anderson, One Person, No Vote .

Numerous works have illuminated different national iterations of popular-front feminism in Latin America, including Yolanda Marco Serra, “Ser ciudadana en Panamá en la década de 1930” (Being a citizen in Panama in the 1930s), in Un siglo de luchas femeninas en América Latina (A century of female struggles in Latin America), ed. Asunción Lavrin and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz (San José, 2002), 71–86; Esperanza Tuñón Pablos, Mujeres que se organizan: El frente único pro derechos de la mujer, 1935–1938 (Women who organize: The single front for women's rights, 1935–1938) (Mexico City, 1992); Enriqueta Tuñón, ¡Por fin … ya podemos elegir y ser electas! El sufragio femenino en México, 1935–1953 (At last … we can now choose and be elected! Female suffrage in Mexico, 1935–1953) (Mexico City, 2002); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, N.C., 2005); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, 2000); Corinne A. Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era: Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh), 1935–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996); Sandra McGee Deutsch, “Argentine Women against Fascism: The Junta de la Victoria, 1941–1947,” Politics, Religion, and Ideology 13 (no. 2, 2012), 221–36; Sandra McGee Deutsch, “The New School Lecture—‘An Army of Women’: Communist-Linked Solidarity Movements, Maternalism, and Political Consciousness in 1930s and 1940s Argentina,” Americas , 75 (Jan. 2018), 95–125; and Adriana María Valobra, “Formación de cuadros y frentes populares: Relaciones de clase y género en el Partido Comunista de Argentina, 1935–1951” (Formation of cadres and popular fronts: Class and gender in the Communist party of Argentina, 1935–1951), Revista Izquierdas (no. 23, April 2015), 127–56. On suffrage activism in Latin America, see Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln, 1995); Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, 1991); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque, 2005); K. Lynn Stoner, From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1991); Rina Villars, Para la casa más que para el mundo: Sufragismo y feminismo en la historia de Honduras (For the house more than the world: Suffragism and feminism in the history of Honduras) (Tegucigalpa, 2001); June E. Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850–1940 (Durham, N.C., 1990); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1996); Victoria González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park, 2011); Elizabeth S. Manley, The Paradox of Paternalism: Women and the Politics of Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville, 2017); Charity Coker Gonzalez, “Agitating for Their Rights: The Colombian Women's Movement, 1930–1957,” Pacific Historical Review , 69 (Nov. 2000), 689–706; Patricia Faith Harms, “Imagining a Place for Themselves: The Social and Political Roles of Guatemalan Women, 1871–1954” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 2007); Takkara Keosha Brunson, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); and Grace Louise Sanders, “La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934–1986” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2013).

Rupp, Worlds of Women .

María Espinosa, Influencia del feminismo en la legislación contemporanea (Influence of feminism in contemporary legislation) (Madrid, 1920).

Tetrault, Myth of Seneca Falls .

Trouillot, Silencing the Past ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story .

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Educator Resources

Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment

Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution – guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Read more...

Primary Sources

Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

In the second decade of the 20th century, woman suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. In 1913, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment.

The National Woman’s Party (NWP) organized the first White House picket in U.S. history in January of 1917. It lasted nearly three years.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, sent this 1871 petition to Congress requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be heard on the floor of Congress.

The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, sent this 1872 petition to Congress asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office.

This indictment charged Susan B. Anthony with "wrongfully and unlawfully" voting in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY, "being...a person of the female sex." She was one of several women arrested for illegally voting.

Frederick Douglass's son, daughter, and son-in-law signed this 1878 petition to Congress in favor of woman suffrage, along with other residents of the District of Columbia .

In this 1916 resolution, "Rhode Island Union Colored Women's Clubs" asked Congress to secure a federal woman suffrage amendment. African American women organized women’s clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms.

Some women fought for decades for the right to vote. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, a former Civil War nurse, sent this letter to Rep. Edwin Webb, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which held hearings on women's suffrage. 

There was strong opposition to enfranchising women. This 1917 petition from the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party of New York urged the Senate not to pass a federal suffrage amendment giving women the right to vote .

This Congressional resolution, passed in 1919, proposed extending the right to vote to women and became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

This 1920 statement verified that Tennessee had ratified the 19th Amendment. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify, crossing the three-fourths-of-states threshold needed to clinch passage of the amendment.

Teaching Activities

The Women's Rights page on DocsTeach includes document-based teaching activities and primary sources related to women's rights and changing roles in American history – including women's suffrage, political involvement, citizenship rights, roles during the world wars, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and more.

Failure is Impossible  is a play that brings to life the facts and emotions of the momentous struggle for voting rights for women. It was first performed in 1995, as part of commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the 19th amendment at the National Archives. The story is told through the voices of Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Frances Gage, Clara Barton, and Carrie Chapman Catt, among others .  The script is available for educational uses.

Image: Suffrage Parade in New York City, ca. 1912

Additional Background Information

In July 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. The Seneca Falls Convention produced a list of demands called the Declaration of Sentiments. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it called for broader educational and professional opportunities for women and the right of married women to control their wages and property. After this historic gathering, women’s voting rights became a central issue in the emerging debate about women’s rights in the United States.

Many of the attendees to the convention were also abolitionists whose goals included universal suffrage – the right to vote for all adults. In 1870 this goal was partially realized when the 15th amendment to the Constitution, granting black men the right to vote, was ratified. Woman suffragists' vehement disagreement over supporting the 15th Amendment, however, resulted in a "schism" that split the women's suffrage movement into two new suffrage organizations that focused on different strategies to win women voting rights.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in May of 1869 – they opposed the 15th amendment because it excluded women. In the year following the ratification of the 15th amendment, the NWSA sent a voting rights petition to the Senate and House of Representatives requesting that suffrage rights be extended to women and that women be granted the privilege of being heard on the floor of Congress.

The second national suffrage organization established in 1869 was the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The AWSA supported the 15th Amendment and protested the confrontational tactics of the NWSA. The AWSA concentrated on gaining women’s access to the polls at state and local levels, in the belief that victories there would gradually build support for national action on the issue. While a federal woman suffrage amendment was not their priority, an 1871 petition, asking that women in DC and the territories be allowed to vote and hold office, from AWSA leadership to Congress reveals its support for one.

In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). It became the largest woman suffrage organization in the country and led much of the struggle for the vote through 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Stanton became its president; Anthony became its vice president; and Stone became chairman of the executive committee. In 1919, one year before women gained the right to vote with the adoption of the 19th amendment, the NAWSA reorganized into the League of Women Voters.

The tactics used by suffragists went beyond petitions and memorials to Congress. Testing another strategy, Susan B. Anthony registered and voted in the 1872 election in Rochester, NY. As planned, she was arrested for "knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States." She was convicted by the State of New York and fined $100, which she insisted she would never pay. On January 12, 1874, Anthony petitioned Congress, requesting "that the fine imposed upon your petitioner be remitted, as an expression of the sense of this high tribunal that her conviction was unjust."

Wealthy white women were not the only supporters of women's suffrage. Frederick Douglass, formerly enslaved and leader of the abolition movement, was also an advocate. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. In an editorial published that year in The North Star , the anti-slavery newspaper he published, he wrote, "...in respect to political rights,...there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the elective franchise,..." By 1877, when he was U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia, Douglass's family was also involved in the movement. His son, Frederick Douglass, Jr.; daughter, Mrs. Nathan Sprague; and son-in-law, Nathan Sprague, all signed a petition to Congress for woman suffrage "...to prohibit the several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex."

A growing number of black women actively supported women's suffrage during this period. They organized women’s clubs across the country to advocate for suffrage, among other reforms. Prominent African American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago, a leading crusader against lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuskegee Institute faculty member, who insisted in articles in The Crisis , a publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that if white women needed the vote to protect their rights, then black women – victims of racism as well as sexism – needed the ballot even more.

In the second decade of the 20th century, suffragists began staging large and dramatic parades to draw attention to their cause. One of the most consequential demonstrations was a march held in Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. Though controversial because of the march organizers' attempt to exclude, then segregate, women of color, more than 5,000 suffragists from around the country paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol to the Treasury Building.

Many of the women who had been active in the suffrage movement in the 1860s and 1870s continued their involvement over 50 years later. In 1917, Mary O. Stevens, secretary and press correspondent of the Association of Army Nurses of the Civil War, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to help the cause of woman suffrage by explaining: "My father trained me in my childhood days to expect this right. I have given my help to the agitation, and work[ed] for its coming a good many years."

During World War I, suffragists tried to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into reversing his opposition and supporting a federal woman suffrage amendment. But in the heated patriotic climate of wartime, such tactics met with hostility and sometimes violence and arrest. Frustrated with the suffrage movement’s leadership, Alice Paul had broken with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP). It employed more militant tactics to agitate for the vote.

Most notably, the NWP organized the first White House picket in U.S. history on January 10, 1917. They stood vigil at the White House, demonstrating in silence six days a week for nearly three years. The "Silent Sentinels" let their banners – comparing the President to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – speak for them. Many of the sentinels were arrested and jailed in deplorable conditions. Some incarcerated women went on hunger strikes and endured forced feedings. The Sentinels' treatment gained greater sympathy for women's suffrage, and the courts later dismissed all charges against them.

When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women. There was still strong opposition to enfranchising women, however, as illustrated by petitions from anti-suffrage groups.

Eventually suffragists won the political support necessary for ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For 42 years, the measure had been introduced at every session of Congress, but ignored or voted down. It finally passed Congress in 1919 and went to the states for ratification. In May, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 304 to 90; two weeks later, the Senate approved it 56 to 25.

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were the first states to ratify it. On August 18, 1920, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified the amendment – the result of a change of vote by 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn at the insistence of his elderly mother. But those against the amendment managed to delay official ratification. Anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, and their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies and attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. However, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote and delivered the crucial 36th ratification necessary for final adoption. While decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained, the face of the American electorate had changed forever.

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Women’s Suffrage

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 2, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

The women’s suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. It took activists and reformers nearly 100 years to win that right, and the campaign was not easy: Disagreements over strategy threatened to cripple the movement more than once. But on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

Women’s Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women’s suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War . During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States— temperance leagues , religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations—and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the “Cult of True Womanhood”: that is, the idea that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists—mostly women, but some men—gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women’s rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott .

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, “that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution’s protection to all citizens—and defines “citizens” as “male”; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women’s suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women’s votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization’s first president.

By then, the suffragists’ approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were “created equal,” the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral “maternal commonwealth.”

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a “Winning Plan” to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics—hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance—aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists’ campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women’s work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920 , the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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The Long 19th Amendment Project Portal: archival discovery, teaching innovation, and collaborative scholarship about the history of gender & voting rights

A research and teaching collaboration spearheaded by the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

The Long 19th Amendment Project is rethinking the way we write, teach, and talk about the history of women’s suffrage in the United States. This portal is a digital gateway to archival collections, datasets, teaching materials, and scholarship that help us tell a more complex and inclusive story about gender and voting rights in America.

About this Project

Explore the Long 19th Amendment Project Portal

Collections.

Search and browse archival collections. The portal brings together archival materials from repositories across the country. All focus on the history of the women’s suffrage movement or on the history of gender and voting rights in the United States more broadly. The collections page will be available in August 2020.

Explore essays, collaborations, exhibits, and more about the history of gender and voting rights in the United States.

Find teaching resources including #SuffrageSyllabus, lesson plans, and other classroom content for high school and college instructors.

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The nineteenth amendment, where do social movements get their start.

Library of Congress, Records of the National Woman's Party https://www.loc.gov/resource/mnwp.276016

During the United States’ early history, women were denied many of the rights enjoyed by men and faced discrimination because of their sex. Women were excluded from many jobs and educational opportunities. But because they did not have the right to vote (also known as suffrage), women were limited in terms of how much influence they could have over laws and policies. In addition, before the Civil War, many women participated in reform activities, such as the abolitionist movement and temperance leagues. They wanted to pass reform legislation to address the problems they saw in American society, but politicians would not usually listen to those who were disenfranchised (did not have the right to vote). Women’s frustration with their low status in society motivated them to create a movement that eventually resulted in the Nineteenth Amendment. This amendment says “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.” That is, it prohibits discrimination in voting based on sex.

Library of Congress, Records of the National Woman's Party https://www.loc.gov/item/mnwp000060/

Women first organized at the national level in July of 1848, when suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott convened a meeting of over 300 people in Seneca Falls, New York . The attendees included early suffragists Martha C. Wright , Jane Hunt , and Mary M’Clintock , and abolitionist Frederick Douglass . These delegates discussed the need for better education and employment opportunities for women, and the need for suffrage. While there, Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments , which is considered to be the founding document of the women’s rights movement.

The suffrage movement grew larger in the years following the Civil War. Women all across the United States participated in the effort to gain the right to vote, though they did not always agree on which strategy was best. Suffrage organizations formed to carry out a variety of tactics. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her longtime collaborator, Susan B. Anthony , founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), which focused on changing federal law and opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected Black men’s right to vote but excluded women. Several people, including Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe , disagreed with Stanton and Anthony’s position on the Fifteenth Amendment, and formed a new organization: the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). AWSA supported the Fifteenth Amendment and its members were both Black and white.

1909. Palczewski, Catherine H. Postcard Archive. University of Northern Iowa. Cedar Falls, IA.

The leaders of the movement tended to be educated, middle-class white women with money. They set the national agenda, which didn’t always reflect the experiences of all women. Working women and/or women of color experienced discrimination and prejudice not only because they were women, but also based on their class and race. Many Black women joined suffrage organizations that addressed their specific experiences. Leading reformers including Harriet Tubman , Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells , and Mary Church Terrell formed the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) in 1896. The NACWC campaigned in favor of women’s suffrage and improved education, and fought against Jim Crow laws . In 1890, Anthony helped reunite the NWSA and AWSA to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). One member, Alice Paul , thought that the organization was too moderate, so she founded the National Women’s Party (NWP). The NWP had a variety of strategies to bring attention to the suffrage movement. Its members picketed the White House and held demonstrations in nearby Lafayette Park and at the U.S. Capitol and Senate office buildings . They participated in lobbying, nonviolent protests, hunger strikes, civil disobedience, and silent vigils. Street speaking, pageants, and parades were some of their more eye-catching actions. Alice Paul organized the largest suffrage pageant, which took place in Washington, D.C. on March 3, 1913. About eight thousand women marched from the Capitol to the White House, carrying banners and escorting floats. The 500,000 spectators watched the march, some in support. Others harassed and attacked suffragists in the parade; over 100 women were hospitalized with injuries that day. The parade was important, not only because of its size, but also because the participants challenged traditional ideas of how women should behave in public. They were loud, bold, and theatrical. Those who opposed women’s suffrage feared that society would suffer if women played a role besides wife or mother.

Library of Congress, Lot 11052 https://www.loc.gov/item/2014692437/

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3b49099/

Such opposition would eventually be overruled. In 1919, both the House of Representatives and the Senate passed the Nineteenth Amendment. The amendment then went to the states for ratification. Thirty-six states needed to ratify the amendment in order for it to be adopted, and Harry Burn in the Tennessee House of Representatives cast the decisive vote. Burn had planned to vote against the amendment, but changed his mind after his mother urged him to “be a good boy” and vote for ratification. On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment went into effect.

On November 2 of that year, over eight million women voted in the U.S. election for the first time. Women also ran for political office in greater numbers. Jeanette Rankin was one of the few women to hold an office before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. When she was elected to Congress in 1916, she made a prediction that would soon come to pass: “I may be the first woman member of Congress. But I won’t be the last.”

[Cited in Winifred Mallon, “An Impression of Jeannette Rankin,” The Suffragist (March 31, 1917).]

Consider This:

Who are the first leaders who come to your mind? What makes those people great leaders?

Part of a series of articles titled Suffrage in America: The 15th and 19th Amendments .

Previous: The Fifteenth Amendment

Next: Between Two Worlds: Black Women and the Fight for Voting Rights

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Last updated: October 9, 2020

Nineteenth Amendment :

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.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The language that would become the Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced in Congress during the Reconstruction Era. In 1878, Senator Aaron Sargent of California introduced a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would have prohibited the federal and state governments from restricting U.S. citizens’ voting rights “on account of sex.” 1 Footnote See S. Rep. No. 45-523 (1878) (discussing S. Res. 12, 45th Cong., 2d Sess. (1878) ). An earlier suffrage amendment, introduced in 1868 by Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, would have granted suffrage on the basis of citizenship. S.J. Res. 180, 40th Cong., 3rd Sess. (1868) ( “The basis of suffrage in the United States shall be that of citizenship, and all native or naturalized citizens shall enjoy the same rights and privileges of the elective franchise . . . .” ). This bill was never acted upon. See Cong. Globe , 40th Cong., 3rd Sess. 38 (1868) . Another early suffrage amendment, introduced by Representative George W. Julian of Indiana, would have provided that suffrage “shall be based on citizenship, and shall be regulated by Congress,” and all U.S. citizens “shall enjoy this right equally, without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex.” H.R.J. Res. 15, 41st Cong., 1st Sess. (1869) . This language was modeled after the Fifteenth Amendment ’s prohibition on race-based voting restrictions. 2 Footnote Compare S. Res. 12, 45th Cong., 2d Sess. (1878) , with U.S. Const. amend. XV . The Senate did not act on Senator Sargent’s proposal at the time; however, it later voted down the proposed women’s suffrage amendment, as reintroduced, in 1887. 3 Footnote 18 Cong. Rec. 1002–03 (1887) . During the late 1800s, several House and Senate committee reports recommended the passage of joint resolutions proposing a women’s suffrage amendment. For example, in 1882, the Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage reported a suffrage amendment favorably, stating that “to deny to one-half of the citizens of the republic all participation in framing the laws by which they are to be governed, simply on account of their sex, is political despotism to those who are excluded, and ‘taxation without representation’ to such of them as have property liable to taxation.” S. Rep. No. 47-686 , at 1–6 (1882) .

After decades of slow progress at the federal level, the women’s suffrage amendment attained a critical level of political support in the late 1910s. 4 Footnote Eleanor Flexner & Ellen F. Fitzpatrick , Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States 275–76 (1996) . See also Amdt19.2.4 Women’s Suffrage and the Progressive Era. In December 1917, Representative John E. Raker of California reintroduced the joint resolution proposing a women’s suffrage amendment in the Sixty-Fifth Congress. 5 Footnote H.R.J. Res. 200, 65th Cong., 2d Sess. (1917) . During the House of Representative’s debate on the resolution, proponents argued that women should have the right to vote because they had played a key role in the nation’s labor force during World War I. 6 Footnote E.g. , 56 Cong. Rec. 765 (1918) . Moreover, U.S. allies, including Great Britain, had already granted suffrage to many women. 7 Footnote E.g. , id. At least one congressman argued that the extension of the franchise to women would recognize their increasing social and economic independence from their husbands. 8 Footnote Id. at 788 . Proponents also noted that many women paid taxes without having a role in choosing their political representatives. 9 Footnote See id. at 765 .

In general, opponents argued that amending the Constitution to recognize women’s suffrage would intrude on each state’s authority to determine the composition of its electorate 10 Footnote Id. at 764 . and disrupt the traditional notion of the American family. 11 Footnote Id. at 785 . A few congressmen objected because the Nineteenth Amendment would, at least on paper, enfranchise African-American women. 12 Footnote Id. at 766 . Despite some opposition, the joint resolution narrowly achieved the two-thirds majority needed for passage in the House on January 10, 1918. 13 Footnote Id. at 810 .

The Senate debated the joint resolution for several months in 1918. Senate debates touched on many of the same issues as the House debates, including women’s contribution to the war effort, states’ rights, and race. 14 Footnote See, e.g. , id. at 10977–81 . In September 1918, shortly before the midterm elections, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech to the Senate in support of the women’s suffrage amendment. 15 Footnote Id. at 10928–29 . President Wilson noted that women supported the nation’s fight in World War I and contended that the United States could not fight for democracy abroad while denying women the right to vote at home. 16 Footnote Id. In addition to arguing that women’s suffrage was key to winning the war, Wilson stated that the resolution of the nation’s “great problems” after the war would “depend upon the direct and authoritative participation of women in our counsels.” 17 Footnote Id. The day after Wilson’s speech, on October 1, 1918, the Senate rejected the joint resolution proposing the women’s suffrage amendment. 18 Footnote Id. at 10987–88 . The joint resolution failed to attain the two-thirds majority required to propose an amendment to the Constitution. Id. The amendment again failed in the Senate during the Sixty-Fifth Congress on February 10, 1919. 19 Footnote 57 Cong. Rec. 3062 (1919) .

In May 1919, after the new Sixty-Sixth Congress convened, President Wilson called a special session of the national legislature to consider a number of issues, including the women’s suffrage amendment. 20 Footnote Flexner & Fitzpatrick , supra note 4, at 307 . Progress in Congress was swift. The House passed the joint resolution proposing the Nineteenth Amendment on May 21, 1919, 21 Footnote 58 Cong. Rec. 93–94 (1919) . and the Senate approved it on June 4, 1919. 22 Footnote Id. at 635 . Thereafter, it was sent to the states for ratification. 23 Footnote See Joint Resolution Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution Extending the Right of Suffrage to Women, H.R.J. Res. 1, 66th Cong., 1st Sess., 41 Stat. 362 (1919) . Although the new Congress acted quickly on the Amendment, more than a year elapsed before it attained the three-fourths majority of the states necessary for ratification on August 18, 1920. 24 Footnote The Amendment became law when Tennessee ratified it. Tennessee and the Nineteenth Amendment , Nat’l Park Serv. (July 31, 2020), https://www.nps.gov/articles/tennessee-women-s-history.htm . About a week later, on August 26, U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the Amendment to have been ratified. 25 Footnote Amendment to the Constitution, 1920, 41 Stat. 1823 (1920) .

Despite the Nineteenth Amendment ’s ratification, many African-American women and other female minority groups throughout the United States continued to face significant obstacles to voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. These barriers were addressed when the states ratified the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964. 26 Footnote The Twenty-Fourth Amendment prohibits the federal and state governments from conditioning a U.S. citizen’s right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or “other tax.” See Amdt24.1 Overview of Twenty-Fourth Amendment, Abolition of Poll Tax. Congress then enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment . 27 Footnote 52 U.S.C. §§ 10101–10702 . See also Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote , Nat’l Archives , https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/19th-amendment .

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Teaching Ideas

19 Ways to Teach the 19th Amendment

Activities to help students learn a more complete history of the women’s suffrage movement, make connections to current events and find ways to “finish the fight.”

An illustration from “Finish the Fight!” a book for middle-grade readers written by Times journalists, shows the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, “lifting as we climb.” Related Article Credit... Finish the Fight! published by HMH/Versify, Art by Johnalynn Holland, 2020

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By Natalie Proulx

• Published Sept. 17, 2020 Updated March 5, 2021

Last month, the United States celebrated 100 years of the 19th Amendment, which established American women’s right to vote. Ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, and added to the Constitution eight days later, this amendment became the single largest act of enfranchisement in U.S. history.

But the right to vote wasn’t simply handed to women; it was the result of a generations-long fight led by Americans from all walks of life — and that fight didn’t end in 1920.

Jessica Bennett and Veronica Chambers explain in “ Suffrage Isn’t ‘Boring History.’ It’s a Story of Political Geniuses. ”:

As the story is often told, the path to women’s suffrage began ​in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton​ were the leaders of the movement. It granted all women in America the right to vote. And yet we are learning, slowly, that telling is ​wildly incomplete. It was not simply Stanton and Anthony who led the movement​ for voting rights in this country​; ​women of color, working-class and immigrant women also paved the way. The movement did not emerge out of nowhere in 1848; it had roots in the movement to abolish slavery. Many early suffragists were active in that fight. And the 19th Amendment was not an end but a beginning: After its ratification, it would take four more years for many Native Americans even to be considered citizens with voting rights ​in this country, and for some Asian-Americans it would take even longer. Many Black women, while possessing suffrage on paper, could not freely exercise that right until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act barred racially discriminatory voting practices, such as literacy tests. Disenfranchisement at the polls, of course, continues today.

This year, in a book for middle-grade readers, a theatrical performance and a series of articles published in print and online, The New York Times revisited the stories of the women who fought for suffrage.

This teaching resource draws on those texts to help teachers and students learn a more complete history of the struggle for voting rights, make connections to the world today and find ways to “finish the fight” in their own communities. You might use these 19 ideas as a unit plan to dive deep into the women’s suffrage movement, or pick and choose activities that are most relevant to your subject area and learning goals.

The echoes of a century ago are everywhere today: The year 1920 was also an election year; and in the years leading up to it, the streets were filled with protesters (who honed the tools activists use today), while a pandemic ravaged the globe, nearly upending the women’s suffrage movement itself.

So whether you’re teaching about American history or current events, we hope you’ll find something in this resource that will help your students better understand what the fight for suffrage means for them today.

19 Ideas for Teaching Women's Suffrage:

1. start here: an overview of the women’s suffrage movement., 2. build a visual timeline of the movement across america., 3. explore the roles of women of color, queer women, working-class and immigrant women, and their male allies., 4. investigate the strategies suffragists used to fight for the vote., 5. analyze the arguments for and against suffrage., 6. follow the long road to ratification with a game., 7. map the legacy of the 19th amendment., 8. reflect on what it means to be able to vote., 9. research the fight for voting rights today., 10. make connections between two pandemics, 100 years apart., 11-19. going further: projects to demonstrate and extend learning..

If the women’s suffrage movement is new to your students, you might begin by introducing some of the key figures, dates, events and rights that suffragists were fighting for. This activity can be a place to start.

Activity: On their own or as a class, have students complete our “Lesson of the Day: ‘The Complex History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement.’ ”

It includes a warm-up that invites students to make a K/W/L chart, filling in one column with information they already know about the fight for the 19th Amendment and another with questions they have. Then they read and respond to an article about three museum exhibits that aim to broaden the narrative of women’s suffrage.

If this is as far as you want to go, you can wrap up the activity by inviting students to create one of the multimedia projects we suggest in the Going Further section.

Or, this lesson can be the introduction to a longer unit on women’s suffrage: You can follow the rest of this teaching guide step-by-step for a comprehensive exploration of the 19th Amendment, or pick and choose the activities that are most relevant to your curriculum. Better yet, use students’ responses to the reflection questions below to guide your unit or let them choose the lessons they are most interested in.

Throughout the unit, students can add what they’ve learned about the women’s suffrage movement to the last column on their K/W/L charts and use this to create their final projects.

Reflection Questions:

What ideas in this lesson surprised you or challenged your knowledge and beliefs about the women’s suffrage movement?

What questions do you have about this period in history? What more would you like to know?

“The story of the suffrage movement usually starts like this: In July 1848, a group of people got together in Seneca Falls, N.Y., and set forth a series of demands for women’s rights, including the right to vote. But the history of women and voting in the United States extends well before, and beyond, Seneca Falls,” writes Jennifer Harlan in “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History .”

In this activity, students will explore the history of the movement in the United States through text, photographs, postcards, buttons, maps and other artifacts.

Activity: Have your students read “Suffragists Fought for the Vote in Every Corner of the Country,” the first section after the introduction of “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History .” As they read, they should make note of the important dates, locations, events and people involved in the fight for women’s right to vote.

Then, invite them to create a visual timeline of the movement across the United States. Depending on your classroom context, they can do this in a few different ways:

They can create a timeline on paper, or color and illustrate a map printout of the United States.

If they have internet access, they can use the free online tools, TimelineJS or StoryMapJS , which allow users to highlight a series of events or locations, using media and text to tell a story.

Or the class can create a human timeline . Assign small groups of students one event to read about and summarize on a poster or digital discussion board. Then have each group, in chronological order, present its event to the class.

Whichever method they choose, students should use colors, symbols, images and text to tell the story of women’s suffrage across the United States. At a minimum, their pieces should include when women won the right to vote in different states; the notable activists and organizations involved; and important events in the movement, such as significant victories, losses and demonstrations.

What do you notice about the women’s suffrage movement in the United States?

What surprised you or challenged your previous ideas about the timeline of the fight for the right to vote?

What story does your timeline or map tell about women’s suffrage? Write a catchy headline that captures the main idea.

If your students know anything about women’s suffrage, they’ve probably heard of the suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two middle-class white women from the Northeast. But, in fact, people from every race, class and walk of life were involved in the fight for the right to vote.

In this activity, students will learn about the women — and men — who have often been left out of the larger narrative of the suffrage movement.

Activity: Assign groups of students to read the section “There Was Never Just One Kind of Suffragist” in “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History ” through the lens of one of the groups listed below. Depending on how much time you have, students might also read the suggested related text to dig deeper into the roles and struggles of their particular group.

Black women ( Related texts: “ Tackling a Century-Old Mystery: Did My Grandmother Vote? ” or the section on Mary Church Terrell in “ Meet the Brave but Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote .”*)

Asian-American women ( Related text: The section on Mabel Ping-Hua Lee in “ Meet the Brave but Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote .”*)

Latinas ( Related text: “ Overlooked No More: Jovita Idár, Who Promoted Rights of Mexican-Americans and Women ”)

Native women ( Related text: “ In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next .”)

Queer women ( Related text: “ How Queer Women Powered the Suffrage Movement ”)

Working-class and immigrant women ( Related text: “ Overlooked No More: Leonora O’Reilly, Suffragist Who Fought for Working Women ”)

Male allies ( Related text: “ 7 Suffragist Men and the Importance of Allies ” from Turning Point Suffragist Memorial*)

*These articles are written at a lower Lexile level than the other Times texts.

Alternatively, or in addition to the texts they read, students can watch the 55-minute performance “ Finish the Fight ,” an original play commissioned by The New York Times that brings to theatrical life the biographies of lesser-known activists who helped to win voting rights for women. Groups of students might focus on one of the suffragists it profiles: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, Zitkala-Sa or Jovita Idár. Please be sure to preview the play to make sure it is appropriate for your students.

On paper using a template or with a free digital design program like Canva , students can create a one-pager that represents the group or person they learned about. It might include: a summary of their role in the women’s suffrage movement; their motivations to fight for the vote; the strategies and tactics they used; the unique challenges they faced (such as racism, nativism or elitism); a notable quote or two; and images or illustrations.

Do a gallery walk of the one-pagers — either in person or online by posting their pieces to a virtual bulletin board like Padlet — and invite students to comment on each piece.

Which people or groups interested you most? Why?

Why do you think these stories have been left out of the narrative of the women’s suffrage movement for so long?

Taken together, what story do these profiles tell about women’s suffrage? How does this story challenge the traditional narrative about the movement?

Suffragists weren’t given the right to vote; they won it. In “Suffragists Were Revolutionary Political Strategists,” the next section of “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History ,” Ms. Harlan writes:

Inspired in part by the British suffrage movement — led by Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose motto was “Deeds not words” — new leaders including Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and groups such as the N.W.P. [National Woman’s Party] emerged that took a more radical tack. While they never adopted their British counterparts’ most violent tactics, which included bombings and arson, they did take to heart the sentiment that, if the vote was finally to be won, they would have to take their fight to the streets, and to the very doorstep of power itself. Many tools of protest that activists use today were honed by the suffragists, from mass marches and picketing outside the White House to wearing badges and pins to express support for a cause. “What these women were so good at was making sure suffrage was a topic on everyone’s mind,” [the historian Susan Ware] said. “It was everywhere. And you had to take a stand.”

In this teaching idea, students are invited to examine primary and secondary sources just as a historian does to make inferences and draw conclusions about the types of tactics and tools suffragists used to win the vote.

Activity: Invite students to explore the text sets below, which include images and text from The Times’s Suffrage at 100 series. Each illustrates a specific tactic employed by the suffragists (but don’t tell students what they are yet — part of the fun is seeing if they can guess each strategy based on clues in the texts):

Strategy #1: Protest

Strategy #2: Media

Strategy #3: Publicity Stunts

Strategy #4: Cartoons

Strategy #5: Photography

You might set this up as a jigsaw or stations activity, so students can interact with multiple text sets. (We Are Teachers has tips for planning and using virtual stations online , while this teacher blog has ideas for setting them up for the socially distant classroom .)

As students study each text set, they can use this graphic organizer to take notes about what they notice and any inferences they can make about the ways suffragists fought for their right to vote. Based on what they’ve seen, they can draw a conclusion about the type of strategy each text set illustrates.

Once students have completed the activity, have them discuss their inferences and share their guesses for each strategy. Then you can reveal the correct answers. Or if you have time, invite students to read more about the tools and tactics in these related Times articles:

“Suffragists Were Revolutionary Political Strategists” in “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History ”

“ Fighting for the Vote With Cartoons ”

“ For Black Suffragists, the Lens Was a Mighty Sword ”

What symbols, slogans, themes and imagery did suffragists use to garner support for their cause? How effective were these devices?

What do you think is meant by the statement: “Suffragists weren’t given the right to vote; they won it”? What evidence in the primary sources you’ve seen supports this claim?

Ms. Harlan writes that “many tools of protest that activists use today were honed by the suffragists.” Which of these strategies and tools do you see activists using in political movements across the country and around the world today?

“To understand the suffragists, and why their battle took so long, you also have to understand the anti-suffragists,” Jennifer Schuessler writes in “ The Women Who Fought Against the Vote .”

Indeed, as the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum across the United States, so did resistance to it from business interests, religious organizations, political parties and even The New York Times editorial page .

While both the arguments for and against suffrage evolved throughout the movement, in this activity, students will primarily focus on those debates that took place during the two decades leading up to the 19th Amendment. They’ll analyze secondary and primary sources, including articles, speeches, postcards, political cartoons, posters and advertisements, to find out why some people supported women’s right to vote — and others fought against it.

Activity: If you are short on time, have students read and view the images and cartoons in the following secondary sources, and then make a list of some of the arguments for and against suffrage:

Pro-suffrage : “Suffragists Fought for More Than Just the Vote” in “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History ” (The New York Times, 2020)

Anti-suffrage : “ The Women Who Fought Against the Vote ” (The New York Times, 2020)

If you have more time, you might invite students to explore several of the primary sources below via a jigsaw, stations or Pick a Number activity. They can use this graphic organizer to deconstruct and analyze the arguments presented in each source.

Pro-suffrage:

“Two Women Discuss the Suffrage” by Sara Yorke Stevenson and Agnes Repplier (Letters to the editor, The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 13, 1908)

“ Margaret Hinchey Tells of Wilson ” (Article, The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1914)

“ A Few Leading Questions ” (Pamphlet, The Rochester (N.Y.) Political Equality Club, Jan. 1, 1903)

“ Speech on Woman Suffrage ” by Jane Addams (Speech, June 17, 1911)

“ The Meaning of Woman Suffrage ” by Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (Article, The Chinese Student’s Monthly, May 12, 1914)

“ Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times ” by Alice Duer Miller (Poetry collection, 1915)

“ Toast on Suffragists ” (Monday Club Luncheon in Missouri, 1913)

“ Votes for Women ” by Katherine Milhous (Postcard, 1915)

“ Women Vote Under These Flags ” (Poster, National American Woman Suffrage Association, early-20th century)

“ Woman Suffrage and the 15th Amendment ” by Mary Church Terrell (The Crisis, August 1915, p. 191)

Anti-suffrage:

“ Suffrage and Women’s Ideals ” (Editorial, The New York Times, May 13, 1913)

“ ‘Our Suffrage Movement Is Flirtation on a Big Scale’ ” by Edward Marshall (Article, The New York Times Magazine, May 25, 1913)

“ The Woman Suffrage Crisis ” (Editorial, The New York Times, Feb. 7, 1915)

Anti-suffrage advertisement by the Iowa Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (Advertisement, The Iowa Homestead, May 25, 1916)

“ Household Hints ”(Pamphlet, The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, early-20th century)

“ Election Day! ” by E.W. Gustin (Cartoon, 1909)

“ Looking Backward ” by Laura Foster (Cartoon, 1912)

Why did suffragists want the right to vote? What roles did race, social position and economic status play in their arguments?

What were some of the reasons people were opposed to women’s suffrage? What roles did race, social position and economic status play in their arguments?

How does understanding each position help us better understand the suffrage movement as a whole?

The 19th Amendment was finally passed on June 4, 1919. But there was still more to do. In “ Join the Final Drive to Suffrage ,” Ms. Harlan writes:

The passage of the 19th Amendment was a huge victory for the suffrage movement, the culmination of activism spanning nearly a century as women fought for a voice in the political system. But their work was unfinished. After Congress, the amendment moved to the 48 state legislatures, three-quarters of which had to ratify it for it to become law. The race to 36 was on.

In this activity, students will play the “Votes for Women” board game to better understand the ratification process and why, as Ms. Harlan says, “the suffrage movement’s victory was never promised.”

Activity: To start, you might want to review how an amendment gets added to the Constitution and discuss what it means to “ ratify ” it.

Then, have students read the short article “ Join the Final Drive to Suffrage ” to learn more about the 19th Amendment’s road to ratification.

Next, divide them into small groups to play the “Votes for Women” game. Each group will need one die, a token for each player and the game board . (You can try this game virtually by sharing the game board on your screen, using an online dice roller and marking each player’s position on the board with your video platform’s annotation tools.)

For an added visual and interactive element, you can have students color in a map that shows each state’s passage of the bill as they move along the game board. Whoever gets to 36 states first, wins!

What surprised you about what it took to ratify the 19th Amendment?

Ms. Harlan writes, “It seems an indisputable idea now, a century later. But the suffrage movement’s victory was never promised.” What does she mean by this? What evidence from the article or from the game supports this idea?

What are some important takeaways you learned about the ratification process or the women’s suffrage movement from this activity?

“The fight for suffrage was not just about the right to vote,” Ms. Harlan writes in “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History .” “It was about equality for women in all areas of life,” she explains.

Women’s quest for political power has stretched well beyond the passage of the 19th Amendment. Throughout the 20th century, the voting rights of many women of color were still not secure; activists continued to fight for them. And in the past 100 years, women have carried on the campaign for equality in all areas of life, including pay equity, educational resources and bodily autonomy.

In this activity, students explore the freedoms, movements and accomplishments throughout history that were born of the women’s suffrage movement and discuss what they mean for their own lives.

Activity: Have students read “Suffragists Transformed America’s Democracy,” the last section of “ Suffrage at 100: A Visual History .”

As they do, they can create a concept map , either on paper or using an online application like MindMeister , that illustrates the relationship between the women’s suffrage movement and issues that have affected women in the United States throughout history and still affect them today. It can include important federal legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Title IX, as well as personal issues like schools and housing.

If you want students to go further, they can add their own ideas based on their prior knowledge, connections to their lives, interviews with friends and family, or research. Here are a few texts from the Suffrage at 100 collection they might start with:

“ 100 Years Later, These Activists Continue Their Ancestors’ Work ”

“ My ___ Was a Suffragist ”

“ Feminist Factions United and Filled the Streets for this Historic March ”

“ The Suffragists Fought to Redefine Femininity. The Debate Isn’t Over. ”

As they read, students might consider the following questions: What milestones has the right to vote allowed women to achieve? What other movements have connections to the suffrage movement? How did the campaigns for racial and economic justice intersect with the quest for gender equality? What rights, issues and attitudes are women continuing to fight for and against today? How can you show the ways these things relate to one another in your map?

How would you define the legacy of the women’s suffrage movement? In other words, what has it meant that women have been able to vote for the past 100 years?

To what extent has the 19th Amendment guaranteed full equality for women? What is still left to be done?

What lessons can we learn from the suffrage movement that we can apply to the fight for equal rights today?

This year, 2020, is an election year. Which of the issues you explored, if any, are on the ballot this fall? Which ones would you like to see the candidates discussing? Why?

Related Article

Why does voting matter? In “ 11 Female Voices, From Age 13 to 110, on Why the Vote Matters ,” women from across backgrounds, experiences, generations and locations share what a century of suffrage means to them. Here are just a few of their voices:

To me, voting means fighting. Nothing was given to us: to women, to people of color, to people with disabilities. As a Black, disabled woman, I sit at all three of those intersections. — Kiara Marshall, Model and advocate for disability rights I really wasn’t that politically active five or so years ago. It was only when I saw how threatened and how fragile all of the gains that women in my mother’s generation had made that I jumped to action. I really woke up. I don’t think I realized how precious and how vulnerable those rights that I enjoy are. — Padma Lakshmi, Cookbook author and host and executive producer of “Top Chef” and “Taste the Nation” It’s a beautiful concept, each vote having exactly the same amount of power — woman, man, transgender, Black, white, brown, gay, straight. One vote each, all with exactly the same weight. Of course it doesn’t really work like that, which is why we have to fight to end voter suppression and get every citizen equal access to the ballot. I think sometimes people lose sight of the blood that’s been shed over the right to vote — quite a lot of it. It’s the most basic building block of our democracy. — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, actor (“Veep,” “Seinfeld”) and a host of the 2020 Democratic National Convention

What does voting and political participation mean to your students, their families and their communities? In this activity, they can discuss and reflect on the significance of suffrage today.

Activity: Have students read at least two of the responses of their choosing from the piece above. Then, invite them to share their own thoughts and discuss with others what it means to be able to vote or participate in democracy.

Here are a few ways you might do this in your classroom, whether in-person or online:

Engage students in a discussion protocol, like a Think-Pair-Share , Fishbowl or Big Paper conversation, to talk about why they think the vote matters. Then, they can each write their own short essay or record a video via Flipgrid about what suffrage means to them.

The Learning Network celebrated the International Day of Democracy on Sept. 15 with a special Student Opinion question: “ Is Your Generation Doing Its Part to Strengthen Our Democracy? ” Based on an essay written by Representative John Lewis shortly before he died this past summer, it asks students what democracy means to them and how they can play a role in it. Invite your students to respond and read what other teenagers have to say in the comments.

Have your class join our Civil Conversation Challenge , in which we invite teenagers to have productive conversations about the most pressing issues of the upcoming 2020 election, one of which is voting .

Encourage students to interview a woman in their family or community about what the vote means to her. As a class, brainstorm a list of questions they can ask, like: When was the first time you voted? In what ways do you participate in politics? What issues are most important to you and why? Then, have students share what they learned with their classmates via an edited audio recording or short written article.

Why did voting matter to the suffragists? Why does voting matter to women now? What has changed and what has stayed the same?

What impact has the legacy of the women’s suffrage movement had on the country today?

There “are lots of things you can do even if you can’t vote,” Mari Copeny, an eighth-grade student and water-rights activist, says . “You can write letters. You can go to protests. You can post online to educate others. Anybody can make a difference.” Indeed, many suffragists took their children to protests and their daughters carried on their fight . How civically engaged are you? What role do you think young people can — or should — play in a democracy?

In 2020, there are still people across the United States and its territories and commonwealths who do not have full voting rights. Residents of American Samoa, for example, are considered “nationals” not “citizens” so they do not have the right to vote in American elections. People who are incarcerated or have felony convictions are not allowed to vote in many states, even after they have served their prison sentence. Some people with mental disabilities , like autism, who are under a conservatorship cannot vote either.

Then, there are Americans today who, while having the right to vote on paper, face significant structural barriers to casting their ballots. People of color and poor people in particular face voter suppression in the form of ID laws , voter roll purges and sparse polling places . And young people, especially college students, also face roadblocks, like restrictions on early-voting access and voter registration .

In this teaching idea, students can research one such group to learn more about their struggles for enfranchisement and the movements fighting for their rights.

Activity: Students might start by doing their own research to find out who can and cannot vote in U.S. elections, or what kinds of groups tend to face voter suppression. Then, they can choose one group to research further, focusing on the barriers they face to voting, the organizations working to expand or secure their rights, and what individuals can do to help.

Here are just a handful of groups they might research, along with links to organizations that provide advocacy for them:

Young people

African-Americans

People in prison

People with disabilities

Latinx people

People with limited English proficiency

Native Americans

American Samoans

16- and 17-year-olds

Students might use their findings to formulate an argument for why this group of people should have the right to vote or what changes should be made to make voting more accessible for them. They can present their case in the form of an essay, editorial or slide show presentation.

Another option? Teach our 2014 lesson plan “ Fair Elections in Jeopardy? Connecting the Dots Among Voting Rates, Rights and Restrictions ” or invite students to play “ The Voter Suppression Trail ” game to learn more about voter suppression today.

What connections can you see between your group’s fight for voting rights and the women’s suffrage movement?

What roles do race, class and ability, particularly, play in access to voting rights?

Consider the relationship between voting and power in a democracy. How did suffrage give women more power in the United States? Why did some people not want women to have that power? How might being able to vote empower the people you researched? Why might the government not want this group to have political power? What connections can you make?

To what extent should voting rights be expanded to those who don’t have them? What can be done to make voting more accessible to those who do?

The years leading up to the 1920 election looked eerily similar to 2020: political campaigns, protests and, yes, even a pandemic. In this activity, students draw connections between the era during the 1918-19 flu and the coronavirus period they are living in today.

Activity: Have students read the article “ How the Spanish Flu Almost Upended Women’s Suffrage .” As they do, they should annotate the text and images, marking any places they see connections between the climate of 1917-1920 and what they are experiencing in 2020.

Their connections don’t have to be limited to the pandemic, though. They might also comment on the election, voting rights, political protests, gender roles, race, way of life or anything else they think is relevant.

To take this activity further, you might invite students to collect artifacts, like news articles, social media posts and photos, from 2020 that speak to the connections they made in the article.

What are some of the major similarities and differences you noticed between the era of the Spanish flu and the one you are living in?

What impact did the 1918-19 pandemic have on the women’s suffrage movement? On the elections of 1918 and 1920? What impact has the coronavirus pandemic had on the protests for racial justice today? How do you think it will affect the 2020 election? Do you notice any patterns?

What lessons can we learn from this period in history? How can we apply them to our lives today?

After students have done one or more of the activities above to explore the history of the women’s suffrage movement, invite them to show what they know or extend their learning with any of these culminating projects.

Multimedia Projects

Allow students to get creative with a final project for this unit. They can come up with their own ideas or try one of these suggestions.

11. Create a visual representation of women’s suffrage. This can take any form. Students could create a timeline or map to show the complete history of the fight for the right to vote, all the way up until today. They could tell the story of women’s suffrage through a comic strip, short video, TikTok series or theatrical performance. Or they could make a statement about the 19th Amendment or voting rights today through an editorial cartoon or Op-Art .

Another option? Students can design a monument to the suffragists, like the artists who recently built a sculpture dedicated to Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to be installed in New York City’s Central Park. Students can create a tribute to the suffragists of their choice, accompanied by a short artist’s statement that explains the people, artifacts and symbols they chose to represent, as well as where they would have their monument installed and why.

Whatever they choose to make should highlight and show the relationships between the key figures, events and themes that they learned about.

12. Make a found poem or blackout poem . Invite students to use the words and images in one or more of the articles they explored to create a poem that speaks to the major activists, events, themes or ideas of the history of the women’s suffrage movement.

13. Produce a podcast. Students can record a podcast up to five minutes about anything related to women’s suffrage. Maybe it’s a brief history of the movement or a particular suffragist. Or an interview with a family member about the meaning of political participation. Or an investigative report into voting rights or women’s rights in their community. They can submit whatever they create to our annual podcast contest starting April 8, 2021.

Research Projects

There are many threads students can choose to further investigate the history of suffrage in the United States and around the world. As an extension project, have them come up with a question of their own to explore or research one of these topics.

14. Dig deeper into the history of voting rights in the United States. Though the expansion of the electorate that followed the 19th Amendment was the largest in the history of the United States, it wasn’t the first or the last: The 15th Amendment enfranchised African-American men, for example, and the 26th Amendment 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds.

And beyond the Constitution, laws and Supreme Court decisions have both expanded and restricted suffrage. For example, the Snyder Act in 1924 made all Native Americans citizens, and the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 made it possible for Chinese immigrants to be naturalized. Through these laws, these groups gained greater access to the rights and privileges of citizenship, including voting.

But even after they had, on paper, secured the right to vote, many people of color — especially Black, Native and Latinx people — were functionally disenfranchised by poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries and other forms of voter suppression. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 barred racial discrimination in voting. Even so, many people of color continue to struggle for access to the ballot. In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively struck down the heart of that law in Shelby County v. Holder, and voter suppression persists in many communities.

Invite students to choose a topic related to voting rights and research its history. How did this amendment, law or decision come to pass? Who worked for or against it? What motivated them? What connections can students make between this history and the women’s suffrage movement?

15. Learn about women’s suffrage around the world. Students might research the women’s suffrage movement in another country and compare it to the American movement. What similarities and differences do they notice? What inspiration did American suffragists take from those in the United Kingdom, Finland and Denmark? What patterns do they see in the reasons women fought for suffrage, whether in the United States, Brazil, Japan or Saudi Arabia? What barriers to voting do women in those countries still face?

16. Get to know an “overlooked” suffragist. In honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, The Times’s “Overlooked” project is publishing a series of obituaries about remarkable suffragists whose deaths went unreported in The Times. Have your students choose one of these women to read about and then create something to depict her life, like a mixed media collage or an imaginary Instagram feed:

Jovita Idár Ida B. Wells-Barnett Laura de Force Gordon Esther Morris Leonora O’Reilly Mabel Ping-Hua Lee Mary Church Terrell

17. Research your local suffrage history. Invite students to play historian and investigate the movements that took place in their own cities or states. They could plan a walking tour on Google Earth that highlights the locations, buildings and monuments important to the suffrage fight in their community. Their tour might include interesting facts, stories, photographs or anything else they discover in their research.

Community Projects

The fight for women’s rights and voting rights in the United States is far from over. Here are a few ways your students might get involved if they’re so inspired:

18. Educate others about voting rights and women’s rights. How can your students share what they’ve learned with their school, the wider community or the world?

They can display a piece of art they created to represent the women’s suffrage movement on their school website or in the hallway. They could create an infographic to debunk common myths about suffrage and post it on their social media pages. They could write an opinion essay on a topic related to suffrage and submit to their school newspaper or our annual editorial contest . Or anything else they can dream up: a public service announcement, a virtual school play or a fund-raiser for a local organization.

The goal should be to share what they’ve learned about the history of women’s suffrage and to promote women’s rights and voting rights today.

19. Get involved with the 2020 election or a local women’s organization. Even if students aren’t old enough to participate, there are ways they can help others exercise their right to vote. Youth Service America offers dozens of ways young people can get involved, as well as special recommendations for taking action safely during the pandemic. Find even more ideas in our teaching resource “ Election 2020: 11 Ways to Engage Students From Now Until November. ”

They can also look into joining local, national or global organizations that support women’s rights and civic participation, such as the League of Women Voters . If they can’t find a group they want to get involved with, they can start a school club of their own.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

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On this day in history, June 4, 1919, Congress passes 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote

C ongress passed the 19th Amendment, granting the right to vote to women, on this day in history , June 4, 1919 — sending the text of the amendment to the states for ratification. 

The amendment read, "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." 

The Senate voted 56-25 in favor of the amendment, said the U.S. Senate's webpage for the centennial of women's suffrage. 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, JUNE 3, 1965, ED WHITE BECOMES FIRST AMERICAN TO WALK IN SPACE: ‘JUST TREMENDOUS’

Two weeks earlier, on May 21, the House of Representatives had voted 304-89 to approve the text of the amendment, notes the Library of Congress website. 

The amendment was then signed by Thomas Marshall, President Woodrow Wilson 's vice president. 

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Many were opposed to women having the right to vote. 

"Artists created political cartoons that mocked suffragists. Religious leaders spoke out against women’s political activism from the pulpit. Articles attacked women who took part in public life," says website Crusadeforthevote.org.  

In the 1860s, opponents of woman suffrage began to organize locally. 

" Massachusetts was home to leading suffrage advocates, and it was also one of the first states with an organized anti-suffrage group," that site also says.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, FEB. 3, 1870, 15TH AMENDMENT IS RATIFIED, GRANTING BLACK MALES THE RIGHT TO VOTE

Following congressional approval of women's right to vote, the amendment had to be ratified by 36 states before it could be added to the Constitution.  

At the time, there were only 48 states in the United States. 

The first three states to ratify the 19th Amendment moved quickly. 

On June 10, less than a week after the 19th Amendment was passed by Congress, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin had all ratified it, said the National Parks Service website.

Technically, Illinois was the first state to vote for ratification, with Wisconsin second, says the National Parks Service, but the vote in Illinois had to be redone the following week after an administrative error was discovered. 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, DEC. 10, 1869, WYOMING IS FIRST TERRITORY TO GRANT WOMEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE

Later on June 10th, Michigan's state legislature voted unanimously to ratify the 19th Amendment, bringing the total to three states. 

Six days later, on June 16, Kansas, Ohio and New York became the next states to ratify the 19th Amendment. 

By the end of July 1919, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas voted to ratify the amendment, putting the total states at 12. 

By this point, only one state — Georgia — had voted down ratification. 

Georgia would vote eventually to ratify the 19th Amendment in 1970 as a formality, says the National Parks Service website.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, AUGUST 18, 1920, THE 19TH AMENDMENT IS RATIFIED, GRANTING WOMEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE

As the calendar turned to 1920, 22 of the 36 states needed to ratify the amendment had voted to do so. 

By the end of January, five more states had joined their ranks, although South Carolina had "voted overwhelmingly" to reject the amendment. 

On March 22, 1920, Washington became the 35th state to ratify the amendment, says the NPS. 

Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Delaware and Louisiana all voted against ratification during this time. 

Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee ratified the amendment, putting the total at 36. 

About one week later, on August 26, 1920, the ratification was certified by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby and the 19th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution , says the National Archives website.

Despite the ratification of the 19th Amendment, women still faced challenges in their quest to actually vote. 

In four states — Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina — women largely could not vote in the 1920 election as the ratification occurred after voter registration deadlines, notes the American Bar Association. 

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Eventually, each U.S. state would ratify the 19th Amendment. 

The last to do so was Mississippi, who ratified the amendment in 1984.

"I do not believe that women are better than men," prominent suffragist Jane Addams said, according to Crusadeforthevote.org. 

"We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance."

For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle . 

Original article source: On this day in history, June 4, 1919, Congress passes 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote