1920: women get the vote: the 19th Amendment was ratified 85 years ago, after decades of campaigning by the women's suffrage movement.

• Author: Roberts, Sam

When John Adams and his fellow patriots were mulling independence from England in the spring of 1776, Abigail Adams famously urged her husband to "remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors." Otherwise, she warned, "we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

That summer, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal but said nothing of women's equality. It would take another 144 years before the U.S. Constitution was amended, giving women the right to vote in every state.

That 19th Amendment says simply: "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." It took effect 85 years ago in August after a dramatic ratification battle in Tennessee in which a 24-year-old legislator cast the deciding vote.

The amendment was a long time coming. At various times, women could run for public office in some places, but could rarely vote. (As far back as 1776, New Jersey allowed women property owners to vote, but rescinded that right three decades later.)

'WOMANIFESTO'

The campaign for women's rights began in earnest in 1848 at a Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., organized by 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other advocates. Stanton had drafted a "Womanifesto" patterned on the Declaration of Independence, but the one resolution that shocked even some of her supporters was a demand for equal voting rights, also known as universal suffrage. "I saw clearly," Stanton later recalled, "that the power to make the laws was the right through which all other rights could be secured."

Stanton was joined in her campaign by Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, and other crusaders who would become icons of the women's movement. Some were militant. Many were met with verbal abuse and even violence. Already active in the antislavery movement and temperance campaigns (which urged abstinence from alcohol), women often enlisted in the fight for voting rights too.

WYOMING IS FIRST

They staged demonstrations, engaged in civil disobedience, began legal challenges, and pressed their case state by state. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory gave women the vote, with the first permanent suffrage law in the nation. ("It made sense that a place like Wyoming would embrace women's rights," Gail Collins of The New...