Alabama State Bar Centennial Celebration of Women's Suffrage
| Publication year | 2020 |
| Pages | 0118 |
August 26, 2020 will mark the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 19th Amendment reads:
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.
Setting the Stage
The first Woman's Rights Convention was held in July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. This convention marks the beginning of a 72-year campaign in our country to secure the passage of this constitutional amendment. At the convention, a daughter of a lawyer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had the foresight that to improve the rights of women with respect to issues such as marriage, children, property, and wages, women needed the right to vote to engage the political process. Stanton introduced Resolution Nine to the "Declaration of Rights and Sentiments" at Seneca Falls, which read:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
While all the other resolutions unanimously passed, Resolution Nine barely passed.
Meanwhile, in Alabama...
In Alabama, Pierce Burton, a republican representative to the Alabama State House and delegate to the 1867 State Constitutional Convention, published an article entitled "Proposal for Women's Suffrage" in the Demopolis New Era, claiming female suffrage would restore confidence and intelligence to the political process. Three years later, the Livingston Journal re-published Burton's article when Burton was a candidate for lieutenant governor to embarrass him. In 1892, the first woman's club for voting rights formed in Decatur by Ellen Hildreth, followed by Calera, Gadsden, Tuskegee, Huntsville, Selma, and Birmingham. On August 8, 1901, an amendment to Alabama's Constitutional Convention was adopted to allow women who pay taxes on $500 of real estate to vote in all bond elections; however, the next day, the action was reversed. The suffrage movement barely survived in Alabama after this defeat.
In 1913, the Alabama Equal Suffrage Association held its inaugural state convention in Selma with seven chapters participating, culminating in a request for a suffrage bill. J.H. Green of Dallas County introduced the suffrage bill in the state house in 1915, but then withdrew his support. The bill failed by 12 votes shy of the...
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