Today is the anniversary of the adoption of the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution. It’s usually described as “granting women the right to vote,” but the language itself is slightly different; it prohibits federal and state governments from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex.
The US Constitution is actually a bit vague about the whole voting thing. Originally the only voting it mandated was for members of the House of Representatives (the President was elected by the Representatives and Senators were appointed by each state). It didn’t say anything about women and voting. Women could vote in several colonies before they became states.
It wasn’t the US Constitution that denied the vote to women after its adoption; it was the constitutions of the states themselves. Except for New Jersey, where women could vote — as long as they owned property. In an odd twist, that meant only single women — because marriage, at the time, meant that a wife couldn’t own property separately from a husband.
The New Jersey Constitution was very inclusive for its time; “all inhabitants” could vote. As long as they owned property. But then in 1807 the NJ legislature passed a law explaining that when the state Constitution said “all inhabitants,” what it really meant was “white males.”
Some similar wordplay took place over the next century, when there were several legal cases around women’s suffrage. In the 1870s the National Women’s Suffrage Association pointed out that the Fourteenth Amendment granted universal citizenship irrespective of gender, and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denial of voting rights because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Those, they said, obviously cover women too, and voting is part of being a citizen. The Supreme Court said, in effect, that the amendments only protected rights that citizens already had, and it didn’t grant any new ones (like voting). That passed the buck to states, most of which denied women the vote quite explicitly.
Except for Wyoming and Utah. Before they were states, both had territorial constitutions, and both included women’s suffrage. But in Utah, women’s suffrage was revoked in 1887 as part of the Edmunds-Tucker Act. That was a Federal statute that outlawed several aspects of the Mormon Church, which had relocated to Utah to escape persecution. The Edmunds-Tucker Act was ostensibly about polygamy, which the Mormon Church allowed at the time. But it also tacked on some other requirements, including replacing all local judges with federal ones, meddled with the school system, and just as an afterthought, disenfranchised women.
After the 1870s Supreme Court demonstrated that no amount of reasoning was going to change their minds, the women’s suffrage movement changed strategy and decided to work at the state level, getting state Constitutions amended to allow women to vote — beyond the “presidential suffrage” that some states already had. Presidential suffrage was the right to vote in only one case: in a presidential election.
By 1918, women could vote in fifteen states. The constitutional amendment was all ready to go; it had been written forty years earlier by Aaron Sargent, a US Senator from California. He’d introduced it in the 1878 Senate, but it was voted down. The amendment was reintroduced to the Senate in 1914. Then again in 1917. In 1918 and 1919 it was reintroduced five times, and finally passed when the Democratic party senators from the southern states could no longer muster enough votes to block it. (The political parties a century ago were also called “Republicans” and “Democrats” but both were completely different from today’s parties.)
After an amendment passes the Senate, it has to be ratified by at least 36 states. Ratification was easy in states where women could already vote — that included nearly all the states west of the Mississippi River, as well as New York and Michigan. By 1920 35 states had ratified, and only one more was needed. It all came down to one state: Tennessee. The state’s General Assembly had to vote “yes”, but they were pretty evenly divided — and not all of the members had even made up their minds. Harry Burn was one of those; he initially said he was against women’s suffrage, but finally voted yes. When they asked him why, he explained that just before the vote he’d received a note from his mother — he was only 24 — asking him to vote “yes.”
The Nineteenth Amendment took effect on August 26 when the US Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, received the ratification (at 4 in the morning) from the Governor of Tennessee, and signed it. There wasn’t any ceremony; only Colby and his secretary were there at the time.
Even though the Amendment took effect in 1920 and governed all the states, not all of them had ratified it. Some of them did so later anyway, even though it was just ceremonial. But you might be surprised at the timing. Connecticut finally went along with it after just a month, in September 1920. But Delaware waited until 1941. They were well ahead of Florida, though, where they ratified the 19th Amendment in 1969. The last state to ratify was Mississippi, which waited until, if you can believe it, 1984.
By then events had left Mississippi far behind (not the first time I’ve heard that about Mississippi). By the time they ratified the Amendment, August 26 was already Women’s Equality Day, which was first celebrated in 1972. It was created by a proclamation issued by President Nixon, and evidently part of the job of being US President is coming up with a new proclamation about it every year.
