What is the Nineteenth Amendment?

The Nineteenth Amendment grants women the right to vote in federal and state elections, prohibiting denial of the franchise on account of sex. Ratified on August 18, 1920, after a struggle that lasted more than seventy years, the amendment declares that 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, and grants Congress power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation.

The campaign for women's suffrage in the United States is conventionally dated from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in upstate New York. Stanton drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence, demanding the elective franchise for women. Susan B. Anthony joined the cause in the 1850s, and after the Civil War she and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

Lucy Stone and others founded the rival American Woman Suffrage Association the same year, and the two organizations merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association under leaders including Carrie Chapman Catt. State-level victories came first. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and Colorado followed by referendum in 1893. By 1919 fifteen states had granted full women's suffrage and another twenty allowed presidential or primary voting.

Alice Paul and the more militant National Woman's Party turned national attention to a federal amendment after 1913, picketing the White House in 1917 and enduring arrests, hunger strikes, and forced feeding at the Occoquan Workhouse. Public outrage over the treatment of suffragists, combined with women's contributions to the World War I effort, helped move President Woodrow Wilson to endorse the amendment in 1918. Congress passed the amendment on June 4, 1919, and ratification depended on the dramatic vote of Tennessee on August 18, 1920, where state representative Harry Burn changed his vote at his mother's urging, providing the deciding margin.

Women voted in the November 1920 presidential election, although racial barriers continued to keep many Black women from the polls in southern states until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Naturalization candidates should remember the amendment as the constitutional guarantee that women may vote on equal terms with men, a victory celebrated each August 26, designated Women's Equality Day by Congress in 1973.