1920: women get the vote: after decades of effort by the suffrage movement, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified 90 years ago this summer.

• Author: Roberts, Sam
• Position: TIMES PAST

Back in July 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are I created equal, but it didn't say anything about women.

That omission was surely not lost on Abigail Adams. A few months earlier, she had written her husband, John, who was debating independence from England in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and urged him to "remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors" Otherwise, she warned from their home outside Boston, "we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

But it took another 144 years, until 1920, for America's women to be get that "voice or representation," in the form of a constitutional amendment that gave them the right to vote in all of the country.

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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 90 years ago in August, after a dramatic ratification battle that came down to a single decisive vote.

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 (As far back as 1776, New Jersey allowed female property owners to vote but rescinded that right three decades later.)

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 "Declaration of Sentiments" 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. Some were militant. Many faced verbal abuse and even violence. Often women who were already active in the abolitionist movement and temperance campaigns (which urged abstinence from alcohol) 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," Gall Collins of The New York Times wrote in her 2003 book, America's Women. "With very few women around, there was no danger that they could impose their will on the male majority."

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In 1878, a constitutional amendment to give women the vote was introduced in Congress. Nine years later, in 1887, the full Senate considered the amendment for the first time and defeated it by a 2-to-1 margin.

But the suffrage movement was slowly gaining support. With more women graduating from high school, going to college, and working outside the home, many Americans began asking: Why couldn't women vote?

There was plenty of opposition, according to Collins: Democrats feared women would support the Republican Party, which was the more socially progressive party during this period. The liquor industry, concerned that many women supported Prohibition, also opposed women's suffrage.

In 1918, after much cajoling and picketing by suffragists, President Woodrow Wilson changed...