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Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902 and Susan B. Anthony died in 1906, but a new generation of women had come forward to fight for women’s suffrage. They were armed with new weapons, and they were determined to succeed.
In 1920, they were finally able to proclaim, “Victory.”
The National American Woman Suffrage Association kept pressure on lawmakers to give women the vote. In 1912, NAWSA leaders decided to focus on the newly elected president, Woodrow Wilson. They hoped that Wilson would influence Congress to pass the amendment. ▶
The National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, took more radical action. In January 1917, women began picketing the White House every day to pressure Wilson to support the amendment. After six months, police began arresting picketers for minor offenses. Some women chose prison over paying fines. Eventually, Wilson insisted that they be released. The new generation of suffrage leaders often distanced themselves from African Americans in order to gain white political support. ▼
◀ After the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, 1 million women joined the wartime labor force. NAWSA supported the war. It hoped that female war workers would point out women’s contributions to society. But Alice Paul and her supporters were antiwar. When they burned a statue of Woodrow Wilson in the summer of 1917, the whole suffrage movement was attacked for disloyalty and “pro-Germanism.”
In January of 1918, President Wilson finally endorsed the Anthony Amendment and urged Congress to vote for it. The next day, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, but the Senate failed to pass it. In the elections of 1918, suffragists campaigned for pro-suffrage Senate candidates in four states. They won in two of them. That was enough to get the necessary vote in the Senate the next time the amendment was voted on, which was on May 21, 1919. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear.
◀ By 1919, women had won full suffrage in 15 states and the right to vote in presidential elections in another 13 states. It was clear that only an amendment to the Constitution would give all women the right to vote. However, it’s not easy to amend the Constitution. A proposed amendment has to receive a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress (the Senate and the House of Representatives). Then it has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.
▲ By August of 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but one more was needed to make it law, and Tennessee was due to vote. On August 13, the Tennessee Senate passed the amendment 25 to 4, but when the Tennessee House voted on August 18, the vote was tied 48 to 48. A tie vote meant the amendment would be defeated. Suddenly, 24-year-old Harry Burns changed his vote to a yes, later stating: “...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
