Nineteenth Amendment

• Author: Deborah L. Rhode
• Pages: 1808-1809

Page 1808

Ratification of the women's suffrage amendment in 1920 marked the culmination of a struggle spanning three quarters of a century. Under the leadership of organizations including the National Woman's Suffrage Association and the National Women's Party, over 2 million women participated in some 900 campaigns before state and federal legislators, party officials, and referendum voters. By the time the amendment was adopted, a majority of the states had already given some recognition to women's VOTING RIGHTS.

Political agitation for enfranchisement began in 1848, at the first women's rights convention in SENECA FALLS, New York. In its Declaration of Sentiments, the convention included suffrage as one of the "inalienable rights" to which women were entitled. As the century progressed, the vote assumed increasing importance, both as a symbolic affirmation of women's equality and as a means to address a vast array of sex-based discrimination in employment, education, domestic law, and related areas. Once the Supreme Court ruled in MINOR V. HAPPERSETT (1875) that suffrage was not one of the PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES guaranteed by the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT to women as citizens, the necessity for a state or federal constitutional amendment became apparent.

The struggle for women's rights was a response to various forces. Urbanization, industrialization, declining birth rates, and expanding educational and employment opportunities tended to diminish women's role in the private domestic sphere while encouraging their participation in the public sphere. So too, women's involvement, first with abolitionism and later with other progressive causes, generated political commitments and experiences that fueled demands for equal rights.

Those demands provoked opposition from various quarters. The liquor industry feared that enfranchisement would pave the way for PROHIBITION, while conservative political and religious leaders, as well as women homemakers, painted suffrage as an invitation to socialism, anarchism, free love, and domestic discord. Partly in response to those claims, many leading suffragists became increasingly conservative in their arguments and increasingly unwilling to address other causes and consequences of women's inequality. That strategy met with partial success. As they narrowed their social agenda, women's rights organizations expanded their political appeal. The growing strength of the suffrage movement...