Nineteenth Amendment

THE 19TH CENTURY witnessed the rise of women in prominent, even dominant, positions within the abolitionist and temperance movements throughout the United States. However, interest in women's suffrage did not begin to grow until 1848, during a gathering of women in Seneca Falls, New York, organized by Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The women passed resolutions by a large margin endorsing equal rights for women in the areas of marriage, education, religion, and employment, but endorsed women's suffrage by just a slim majority of votes. Divisions among the women over the tactics to be used, and whether or not the vote should be the key issue within the women's movement, hindered the suffrage movement. In addition, there was a general lack of enthusiasm for women's suffrage among prominent women of the time. Author Edith Wharton believed that women had the necessary skills to get what they wanted without resorting to the ballot box.

After the conference, Stanton worked with Susan Brownell Anthony to form the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA). The NWSA took a more radical approach than the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) by accepting only women as members, working only for the right to vote, and denouncing the Fifteenth Amendment for only enfranchising African-American men. The two organizations bitterly opposed one another until they merged under the leadership of Susan Brownell Anthony in 1890.

Alice Paul further split the suffrage movement early in the 20th century with the establishment of the politically militant National Women's Party (NWP). Paul was dissatisfied with the lack of progress and split with other suffragists over the tactics to be used to draw attention to the cause. Paul supported adopting the more radical and aggressive tactics being used in Great Britain by their suffrage movement. Paul viewed the movement of women into factories in support of the American war effort during World War I as patriotic and did not want to wait, as others in the movement counseled, for the end of the war to push their cause. Other suffragists, and their supporters, pointed to the growing number of states granting suffrage and the adoption of party platforms in 1916 by the Democrats and Republicans supporting women's suffrage, although neither party offered a timetable or [Page 455]thought the issue should be addressed before the conclusion of the war.

A National Woman's Party member works to convince an unidentified man to support the cause of women's suffrage in January 1913, while other Party supporters distribute handbills advertising the Inaugural Suffrage Parade of March 3, 1913.

Paul and the NWP conducted hunger strikes and picketed the White House to draw attention to their cause, tactics that were used by British suffragettes. In July 1917, a number of NWP members attempted to storm the White House and were arrested and placed in the local workhouse. Tensions were further heightened when the women first refused the pardons offered by President Wilson. The women accepted the pardons only after speaking with the attorney general.

Wilson gave his administration's support for women's suffrage in January 1918. Congress passed the legislation on June 4, 1919, and submitted it to the states for ratification. The first two sections of the amendment read: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920, in time to permit women to vote for the first time in a presidential election in the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding.

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