Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution

¶ … Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution [...] how this amendment relates to women's suffrage. This amendment gave women the right to vote, and it took nearly one hundred years from the first idea of voting rights until it actually passed the Congress and became law.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave American women the right to vote, was introduced into the Congress in 1878, but it was not ratified into law until 1920. It marks one of the bitterest feuds in American history. From the time it was introduced until the time it was finally passed, many American women worked with grim determination to see it come to fruition. It was controversial because most men, (and many women), did not believe women should be allowed to vote. The idea of women voting was so contentious to some, that women were jailed, ostracized, and ignored during the fight to gain the vote.

It was not until 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson changed his position that women's right began to gain some support in the country, and it still took another two years for the final measure to pass. In the meantime, several western states had ratified their own amendments allowing women to vote, which fueled the debate and encouraged many women to join in the fight for voting rights.

Leading up to the 1918 reversal of position was a long history of women fighting for equality, including voting rights. The first women's rights convention took place as early as 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY, and that led to work to draft a women's voting bill. It took 30 years for Congress to introduce the bill, and another 42 years for the measure to finally become law. In 1872, suffragist Susan B. Anthony voted in an election, and was arrested, and this led to Congress considering voting rights. In 1875, the Supreme Court rejected a case based on the 14th Amendment rights, and so, women began to work at the state level to pass state legislation. The 1878 bill said "The right of citizens to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" (Linder). It is interesting to note that members of Congress would introduce this bill every year for 41 years, with exactly the same wording, until it finally passed (Linder).

One big step in the process were the states in the West who allowed women to vote. In 1890, Wyoming joined the union, and women had been voting there for many years. It is also interesting to note that it was the Senator from a western state, California, who first introduced the bill in 1878 (Kobach). In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, running for the Bull Moose Party, included women's voting rights in his party platform, which brought more positive attention to the matter. Roosevelt lost the election, but the idea of women's rights had become to seem less offensive to many, and so, in 1920 the measure finally became law.