Free
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902. Susan B. Anthony died in 1906.
But a new generation of women led the fight for women’s suffrage. They had new tools and were determined to succeed. In 1920, they were finally able to proclaim, “Victory.”
The National American Woman Suffrage Association kept pushing lawmakers to give women the vote. In 1912, NAWSA leaders turned to Woodrow Wilson. He had just been elected president. They hoped that Wilson would ask Congress to pass the amendment. ▶
Alice Paul led the National Woman’s Party. It took a bigger step. In January 1917, women began picketing the White House every day to pressure Wilson to support the amendment. After six months, police began arresting them on minor charges. Some women refused to pay the fines. They chose prison instead. After a while, Wilson said they should be freed. The new generation of suffrage leaders often set themselves apart from African Americans. They did this to get white political support. ▼
◀ In April 1917, the U.S. entered World War I. One million women joined the wartime workforce. NAWSA supported the war. It hoped these war workers would point out women’s contributions to society. But Alice Paul and her supporters were antiwar. In the summer of 1917, they burned a statue of Woodrow Wilson. That caused trouble. The whole suffrage movement was attacked for disloyalty and “pro-Germanism.”
In January of 1918, President Wilson finally came out in favor of the Anthony Amendment. He pushed Congress to vote for it. The next day, the House of Representatives passed the amendment. But the Senate didn’t. In the elections of 1918, suffragists campaigned for pro-suffrage Senate candidates in four states. They won in two of them. That was enough. The next time the Senate voted on the amendment, on May 21, 1919, it passed. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear.
◀ By 1919, women could vote in 15 states. In another 13 states, they could vote in presidential elections. It was clear that only an amendment to the Constitution would give all women the right to vote. But it’s not easy to amend the Constitution. An amendment has to get two-thirds of the votes in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Then it has to be approved by three-quarters of the states.
▲ By August of 1920, 35 states had approved the amendment. One more was needed to make it law. On August 13, the Tennessee Senate passed the amendment. But when the House voted on August 18, the vote was tied. A tie meant the amendment would lose. Suddenly, 24-year-old Harry Burns changed his vote to a yes. Later, he said: “...I believe in full suffrage as a right; I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify; I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.” The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had passed. American women had won the right to vote! However, it would take the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s to guarantee suffrage to black women and men.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head [surpass] me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
—Sojourner Truth
