what amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known equally women's suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending nearly a century of protestation. In 1848, the movement for women's rights launched on a national level with the Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
Post-obit the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women's rights movement. Stanton and Mott, along with Susan B. Anthony and other activists, raised public awareness and lobbied the regime to grant voting rights to women. Subsequently a lengthy battle, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Despite the passage of the subpoena and the decades-long contributions of Black women to attain suffrage, poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions connected to cake women of color from voting. Blackness men and women also faced intimidation and often violent opposition at the polls or when attempting to annals to vote. Information technology would have more than 40 years for all women to achieve voting equality.
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Women's Suffrage
During America's early on history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male citizens.
For example, married women couldn't own holding and had no legal claim to any money they might earn, and no female had the right to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and maternity, not politics.
The campaign for women'south suffrage was a small only growing motility in the decades earlier the Civil War. Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated beyond the U.Southward. including temperance leagues, the abolitionist movement and religious groups. Women played a prominent role in a number of them.
Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the platonic woman was a pious, submissive wife and female parent concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new fashion of thinking virtually what information technology meant to exist a adult female and a citizen in the U.s..
READ More than: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women's Right to Vote
Seneca Falls Convention
It was not until 1848 that the movement for women'due south rights began to organize at the national level.
In July of that year, reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York (where Stanton lived). More than 300 people—more often than not women, but as well some men—attended, including sometime African-American slave and activist Frederick Douglass.
In improver to their belief that women should be afforded better opportunities for teaching and employment, most of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their ain political identities.
Announcement of Sentiments
A group of delegates led past Stanton produced a "Proclamation of Sentiments" document, modeled afterward the Annunciation of Independence, which stated: "Nosotros hold these truths to exist cocky-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed past their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
What this meant, amid other things, was that the delegates believed women should have the correct to vote.
Following the convention, the idea of voting rights for women was mocked in the printing and some delegates withdrew their support for the Declaration of Sentiments. Nonetheless, Stanton and Mott persisted—they went on to spearhead additional women'southward rights conferences and they were somewhen joined in their advocacy work by Susan B. Anthony and other activists.
WATCH: Susan B. Anthony and the Long Push for Women'southward Suffrage
National Suffrage Groups Established
With the onset of the Civil War, the suffrage move lost some momentum, as many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the conflict between u.s..
Later the war, women's suffrage endured another setback, when the women'due south rights movement constitute itself divided over the issue of voting rights for Black men. Stanton and another suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Subpoena to the U.S. Constitution, which would give Black men the correct to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color.
In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Adult female Suffrage Clan (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.
That same yr, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Adult female Suffrage Association (AWSA); the group's leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not pass if information technology included voting rights for women. (The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.)
The AWSA believed women'due south enfranchisement could best exist gained through amendments to private state constitutions. Despite the divisions betwixt the ii organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the correct to vote. (When Wyoming was admitted to the Marriage in 1890, women'south suffrage remained part of the state constitution.)
By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage move had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S. Congress for a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to study and debate the issue. Even so, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated.
In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization'due south strategy was to entrance hall for women's voting rights on a country-past-state basis. Within six years, Colorado, Utah and Idaho adopted amendments to their state constitutions granting women the right to vote. In 1900, with Stanton and Anthony advancing in age, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped up to pb NAWSA.
Blackness Women in the Suffrage Movement
During argue over the 15th Amendment, white suffragist leaders like Stanton and Anthony had argued fiercely confronting Black men getting the vote before white women. Such a stance led to a pause with their abolitionist allies, similar Douglass, and ignored the distinct viewpoints and goals of Black women, led by prominent activists like Sojourner Truth and Frances Eastward.West. Harper, fighting aslope them for the right to vote.
Equally the fight for voting rights continued, Black women in the suffrage movement continued to experience bigotry from white suffragists who wanted to altitude their fight for voting rights from the question of race.
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Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 by a grouping of women including Harper, Mary Church building Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. They fought hard for the passage of the 19th Amendment, seeing the women's right to vote as a crucial tool to winning legal protections for Black women (also equally Black men) against continued repression and violence.
READ MORE: 5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment
Country-level Successes for Voting Rights
The plow of the 20th century brought renewed momentum to the women's suffrage cause. Although the deaths of Stanton in 1902 and Anthony in 1906 appeared to exist setbacks, the NASWA under the leadership of Catt accomplished rolling successes for women's enfranchisement at state levels.
Between 1910 and 1918, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington extended voting rights to women.
Likewise during this fourth dimension, through the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women'due south Political Union), Stanton's daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced parades, pickets and marches every bit means of calling attention to the crusade. These tactics succeeded in raising awareness and led to unrest in Washington, D.C.
Protest and Progress
On the eve of the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, protesters thronged a massive suffrage parade in the nation's capital, and hundreds of women were injured. That same twelvemonth, Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union for Adult female Suffrage, which later became the National Woman'due south Party.
The organization staged numerous demonstrations and regularly picketed the White House, among other militant tactics. As a result of these deportment, some group members were arrested and served jail time.
In 1918, President Wilson switched his stand on women's voting rights from objection to support through the influence of Catt, who had a less-combative way than Paul. Wilson too tied the proposed suffrage amendment to America'due south interest in World War I and the increased role women had played in the war efforts.
When the amendment came up for vote, Wilson addressed the Senate in favor of suffrage. As reported in The New York Times on October i, 1918, Wilson said, "I regard the extension of suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the smashing state of war of humanity in which we are engaged."
However, despite Wilson's newfound support, the amendment proposal failed in the Senate past two votes. Another year passed before Congress took up the measure again.
READ More than: The Women Who Fought for the Vote
The Final Struggle For Passage
On May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Mann, a Republican from Illinois and chairman of the Suffrage Committee, proposed the House resolution to approve the Susan Anthony Subpoena granting women the right to vote. The measure passed the House 304 to 89—a total 42 votes above the required ii-thirds majority.
Two weeks afterwards, on June iv, 1919, the U.Due south. Senate passed the 19th Subpoena by two votes over its two-thirds required bulk, 56-25. The subpoena was so sent to the states for ratification.
Within half dozen days of the ratification cycle, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin each ratified the amendment. Kansas, New York and Ohio followed on June xvi, 1919. By March of the following year, a full of 35 states had approved the amendment, just shy of the three-fourths required for ratification.
Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia—had already rejected it before Tennessee's vote on August eighteen, 1920. It was up to Tennessee to tip the calibration for woman suffrage.
The outlook appeared bleak, given the outcomes in other Southern states and given the position of Tennessee's country legislators in their 48-48 tie. The land's decision came downwards to 23-year-sometime Representative Harry T. Burn down, a Republican from McMinn County, to cast the deciding vote.
Although Burn down opposed the amendment, his female parent convinced him to approve it. Mrs. Burn reportedly wrote to her son: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."
With Burn down'due south vote, the 19th Amendment was fully ratified.
READ MORE: How American Women's Suffrage Came Down to Ane Man'due south Vote
When Did Women Get the Right to Vote?
On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified past U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, and women finally achieved the long-sought right to vote throughout the United states of america.
On November 2 of that same year, more than than viii meg women across the U.South. voted in elections for the first time.
It took over 60 years for the remaining 12 states to ratify the 19th Amendment. Mississippi was the final to do and then, on March 22, 1984.
What Is the 19 Amendment?
The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and reads:
"The right of citizens of the United states to vote shall not be denied or abridged past the United States or past any state on account of sex. Congress shall have ability to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/19th-amendment-1
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