The 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. On November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.
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.
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.
While women’s right to vote had not been specifically enshrined in the U.S. Constitution before the 19th Amendment, it hadn’t been prohibited either. For instance, single women owning property “worth fifty pounds” were allowed to vote in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807 before the right was restricted to white males. In 1838 Kentucky allowed widows with school-age children to vote in school elections, and Kansas followed in 1861.
Women’s suffrage, however, was still nearly nonexistent when, in 1869, William Bright, a saloonkeeper and president of the upper house of the Wyoming Territory, introduced a bill granting all female residents 21 years and older the right to vote. According to the Wyoming State Historical Society, the territorial legislature had already passed progressive measures guaranteeing women teachers the same pay as men and granting married women property rights apart from their husbands. Bright’s legislation backing universal women’s suffrage would be groundbreaking in the United States.
The bill passed both houses of the all-male legislature and was signed into law on December 10, 1869, by Republican Governor John Campbell. The following September, 69-year-old Louisa Swain, described by a local newspaper as “a gentle white-haired housewife," became the first woman to cast a ballot under the law in her town of Laramie, Wyoming. There was no protest. “There was too much good sense in our community for any jeers or sneers to be seen on such an occasion,” reported the Laramie Sentinel. The new law also allowed women to serve on juries and hold public office. Esther Morris became Wyoming’s first female justice of the peace in 1870. She tried more than 40 cases during her tenure.
In 1923, the National Woman’s Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination based on sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.
The Snyder Act of 1924 provided Native Americans born in the U.S. full U.S. citizenship. Though the 1870 Fifteenth Amendment granted all U.S. citizens the right to vote regardless of race, it wasn't until the Snyder Act that Native Americans could enjoy the rights granted by this amendment.
Black women did not get the vote until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
In her book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote and Insisted on Equality for All, Martha S. Jones explains:
In the case of the 19th Amendment, even as it’s ratified in August of 1920, all Americans are aware that many African-American women will remain disenfranchised. The 19th Amendment did not eliminate the state laws that operated to keep Black Americans from the polls via poll taxes and literacy tests—nor did the 19th Amendment address violence or lynching. Some African-American women will vote with the 19th Amendment. Some are already voting in California, New York, and Illinois, where state governments have authorized women’s votes. But many Black women faced the beginning of a new movement for voting rights in the summer of 1920, and it’s a struggle they will wage alone because now the organizations that had led the movement for women’s suffrage are disbanding.
Black women are set at a distance quite intentionally because, to hold onto the support of many white southern women, it’s necessary to keep the organization distant from African-American women. It’s also the case that, implicitly, the promise is that the amendment will not interfere with the disenfranchisement of African-American women—so it’s not a campaign premised in women’s universal voting rights; it’s a campaign premised in the process of selective voting rights for white American women.
Jones continues:
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization responsible for many Confederate monuments that litter the American landscape, proposes a monument in Washington, D.C., and that would have been a monument to the so-called “colored mammies” of the South, to some mythical version of enslaved women who were loyal to the southern slave-holding families, who were apolitical in their disposition, who were contented as enslaved people.
Black women know that if a monument to this mythical figure becomes part of the national landscape, it’s one more instrument in their political disenfranchisement. The “mammy” figure isn’t an endorsement of Black women’s political aspirations or their political capacities. I write about the women of the National Association of Colored Women who organized in 1896 to oppose the monument. That monument is defeated even as many other Confederate monuments, as we know today, were successfully installed both in Washington and across the country.
Hallie Quinn Brown, president of the NACW, said if southern white women want to erect a monument to formerly enslaved women, they can do it by encouraging their lawmaker husbands to pass civil rights legislation that would guarantee to Black Americans decent housing, education, healthcare and more.
Efforts to disenfranchise people of color continue today. Black women are again at the forefront of the struggle for racial justice. Their commitment to activism remains a key to guarding our democratic right to vote in free and fair elections.
I hope this post will encourage all women to read more about Black Women’s Suffrage. The citations below are excellent resources for more information.
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Citations:
It's a Struggle They Will Wage Alone.' How Black Women Earned the Right to Vote - Olivia B. Waxman at Time.com
Women’s Suffrage - Staff Editors at History.com
The State Where Women Voted Long Before the 19th Amendment - Christopher Klein at History.com
In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here’s What’s Next. - Nytimes.com
National Association of Colored Women - Allison Lange, Ph.D. at crusadeforthevote.org/nacw / National Women's History Museum