What does the Nineteenth Amendment say?

The Nineteenth Amendment says that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged by the federal or state governments on account of sex. Ratified on August 18, 1920, after a struggle that lasted more than seventy years from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the amendment doubled the American electorate by extending suffrage to women on equal terms with men. Section 1 declares: 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.

Section 2 of the Nineteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to enforce the prohibition on sex-based voting denial through appropriate legislation. The amendment is the only constitutional guarantee that explicitly addresses sex discrimination, although the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been read to apply intermediate scrutiny to most sex-based classifications since Reed v. Reed (1971), Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), Craig v. Boren (1976), and United States v. Virginia (1996).

The road to ratification involved decades of organizing, lobbying, and direct action. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Susan B. Anthony joined the cause in the 1850s and was arrested in 1872 for voting in Rochester, New York. Carrie Chapman Catt led the moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association. Alice Paul founded the more militant National Woman's Party in 1916 and led the Silent Sentinels who picketed the White House throughout 1917, enduring arrests, hunger strikes, and forced feeding at the Occoquan Workhouse.

State-level victories came first. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869. Colorado followed in 1893. Utah, Idaho, and Washington joined by the early twentieth century, and California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon followed in the 1910s. By 1919 fifteen states had granted full women's suffrage and another twenty allowed presidential or primary voting.

Public outrage over the treatment of suffragists, combined with women's contributions to the World War I effort as nurses, factory workers, and volunteers, helped move President Woodrow Wilson to endorse a federal amendment in 1918. Congress passed the amendment on June 4, 1919. Ratification depended on the dramatic vote of Tennessee on August 18, 1920, where state representative Harry Burn changed his vote from no to yes after his mother sent him a letter urging him to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt. Women voted in the November 1920 presidential election.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally ensured that Black women in the South could exercise the right the amendment had granted in name forty-five years earlier. Naturalization candidates should know the Nineteenth Amendment as the constitutional guarantee of women's suffrage.