It’s Time to Celebrate Woman Suffrage

With everyone talking about the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and the 30th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square massacre, few noticed that June 4 was also the beginning of the 100 anniversary of the 19th Amendment.

Those who do know about this centenary think that it all happened in 1920. Few know that it was on June 4, 1919 that Congress proposed to the states an amendment to the US Constitution which said "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."

This proposal had first been introduced into Congress in 1878. It was introduced into every successive Congresses for the next forty years. The turning point in the long struggle came on November 7, 1917 when the male voters of New York granted suffrage to New York’s women.

President Woodrow Wilson, who personally did not like woman suffrage, saw the handwriting on the wall. On January 10, 1918, he appealed to the House to support the amendment. It did so by one more vote than the two-thirds necessary. It failed in the Senate, where the Southern Senators maintained their wall of opposition.

On September 30, Wilson asked a joint session of Congress to pass it as a war measure. Once again, it was the Democratic Senate which came up short.

In November, the voters replaced the Democratic majority in both houses with a Republican majority.

Only two days after the beginning of its first session, on May 21, 1919, the proposed amendment again passed the House. On June 4, it finally passed the Senate and was sent to the states.

This anniversary was not completely ignored. The Library of Congress posted an exhibit. The Woman’s National Democratic Club hosted an evening’s celebration of the "Songs of Suffrage." If other women’s groups did anything on the beginning of the suffrage centenary, they were quiet about it.

There will be a lot of other anniversaries to celebrate. Ratification got off to a quick start when Illinois ratified on June 10, followed by eight more states by the end of June. Ratification screeched to a halt in March of 1920 with one state left to go. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee pushed the total over the edge, by one vote. Twenty-nine of those 36 states had Republican legislatures.

On August 26, 1920 the Secretary of State proclaimed that the 19th Amendment was officially part of the US Constitution.

Other states took their time, even though their women could no longer be denied the right to vote. The Southern states were generally the last to ratify. The last state was Mississippi, on March 22, 1984.

Although August 26 is generally celebrated as Woman Suffrage Day, the fight wasn’t really over. In some Southern states the deadline for registering to vote had passed. So had the deadline for paying the poll tax (usually required to be paid six months before an election). In many families, there was only enough money to pay the poll tax for one voter. Needless to say that went to the man of the house, not the woman. Women’s organizations in poll tax states began a second suffrage movement to abolish the poll tax in order to make it financially possible for women to cast a vote.

Race was also a factor in limiting which women could vote, but that’s a much longer story.

Suffice it to say that "Votes for Women" was a long-time coming, and there will be a lot of anniversaries to celebrate before we get to August 26, 2020.

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It’s Time to Celebrate Woman Suffrage

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