Note: TNT Editor Suzanne Guldimann wrote the original version of this piece in 2020 to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. As TNT went to press this week the US Senate was considering legislation that would greatly impact this right. This seemed like the right time to revisit this critically important chapter of history.
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. It states: “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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Getting this amendment passed was a bitterly-fought, multi-decade battle. One that has been largely forgotten and trivialized. There’s a catchy song and dance number in Walt Disney Studio’s 1964 film Mary Poppins about votes for women. “We’re clearly soldiers in petticoats/dauntless crusaders for women’s votes,” sings Mrs Winifred Banks, the mother of protagonists Jane and Michael Banks.
For many, the scatterbrained firebrand played by Broadway actress Glynis Johns was their first introduction to the issue of women’s votes. Her line, “Take heart, for Mrs. Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again,” refers to the real struggles of early twentieth century British political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, organizer of the suffragist movement in the UK, who was arrested multiple times for civil disobedience. In 1999, Time Magazine named Pankhurst one of the “100 Most Important People of the twentieth century,” for her role in “shaping the idea of women for our time.”
Mrs Banks is a comic character, but votes for women were still very much an issue when the film debuted—women in 28 nations had not yet won the right to vote in 1964, including a surprising number of Western democracies.
Women in Switzerland only gained the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in 1971. Women in Portugal had to wait until 1976, and in the Principality of Liechtenstein women didn’t get the vote until 1986. Saudi Arabia became the last major nation to give women the right to vote in 2015. Women in Vatican City may never have a voice in the governance of that tiny nation state: only cardinals can vote, and only men can be cardinals.
The Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, who wrote the songs for Mary Poppins, would have been too young to remember the suffragette movement referenced in the movie, which is set in the Edwardian era, but studio head Walt Disney wasn’t: he was 19 when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 in the U.S.
The fight for women’s suffrage took more than 70 years to win in America. White women of means had been able to vote in some parts of pre-revolutionary Colonial America, but that didn’t last long. By 1807, every state constitution had language denying women even the right to vote on local issues. The message was clear: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and the right to participate in government to ensure those things, were the domain of men—no girls in the clubhouse, or the state house.
The women’s suffrage movement was rooted in the anti-slavery movement. The leaders of the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, were abolitionists. They proclaimed a corollary to the Declaration of Independence that stated that “all men and women are created equal.” It was the opening salvo of the battle for women’s rights.
Social reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organizers of the event, were passionate advocates for emancipation and the end of slavery. They became key figures in the fight for women’s votes. Not only did they seek rights for women, they fought for rights for everyone.
Suffragists received criticism and abuse. Long before the British newspaper the Daily Mail coined the derogatory term “suffragette” in 1906, activists were arrested, imprisoned, ridiculed, harassed, and attacked.
In Britain, some embraced the term suffragette and responded with guerrilla tactics: chaining themselves to buildings, setting things on fire, and even detonating explosives.
In the US, a pragmatic state-by-state approach was adopted, but there were militant suffragists here as well, including Alice Stokes Paul, an American activist who traveled to Britain to take part in the protests. She was arrested seven times, and was one of the activists force-fed in prison while participating in a hunger strike. It ruined her health but not her determination to win the vote for women.
Her colleague, British suffragette Mary Jane Clarke, died as a result of the same treatment. Pankhurst would describe her as the suffragettes’ first martyr.
Mrs Banks would have been able to vote for the first time in 1913, when women of property over the age of 30 were grudgingly given the right to vote in Great Britain: her cook, maid, and nanny—magical or not—would have had to wait until 1928, when all British women over the age of 21 finally won the right to vote.
While New England was the birthplace for the American suffrage movement, the Western US was more open to the concept of votes for women than the East. Wyoming became the first US state where women had the right to vote. The legislation was passed in 1869, when Wyoming was still a territory, and carried over into statehood. Utah was the second US state to grant women the right to vote in 1870. California’s suffrage movement succeeded in 1911, with a ballot measure that squeaked by with a victory margin of just 4000 votes—proof that every vote really does count.
Black women faced an even more difficult fight for the right to vote. British suffragists and other high-profile white women were frequently in the headlines, but Black activists also helped lead the movement for change. In California, Black social reformers began working for suffrage as early as the 1890s. They included Lydia Flood Jackson, an activist and innovator who devoted her life to women’s rights and social justice. She wrote: “suffrage is one of the most powerful levers by which we hope to elevate our women to the highest planes of life.”
Asian American, Native American, and Latina women also worked for women’s rights. Tye Leung Schulze was the first Chinese American woman to vote in a presidential election in 1912.
“I think it right we should all try to learn not to vote blindly, since we have been given this right to say which man we think is the greatest,” she told the press. Adding, “I think, too, that we women are more careful than the men. We want to do our whole duty more. I do not think it is just the newness that makes us like that. It is conscience.”
Tye was able to vote in California, but she had to move to Washington State to marry the man she loved. California, progressive on the issue of suffrage, had repressive anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited a Chinese American woman from marrying a white man.
California activist Maria Guadalupe Evangelina Lopez was the first suffrage activist to deliver speeches in Spanish in the state. She went on to drive an ambulance during WWI, open a night school for continuing education for adults, and she became the first known Latina professor at UCLA.
In 1911, just months before the California legislature approved voting rights for women, Lopez wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Herald that asked the questions, “Can we have a democracy without women,” and “can we as Californians and Americans live up to the aspirations and ambitions of Abraham Lincoln if a group of our people is deprived, by reason of discrimination of sex, of the right to cast a ballot?”
By 1914, women had the vote in 11 states, but the prospect of war put the issue of a constitutional amendment on hold. By the end of World War I it was clear that the opposition was crumbling even in the most conservative parts of the country. Women had stepped into men’s jobs during the war. A total of more than 117,000 young American men died in the war; more than 200,000 more were injured. The global casualty total was estimated at between 15 and 22 million. In the space of just four years, the old world order had changed.
On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was fully ratified. “The right of the 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” was enshrined in the Constitution. The state of Tennessee was the last to ratify the amendment in 1920, and did so reluctantly.
The Nineteenth Amendment was a major civil rights victory, but not even putting the right for all American citizens to vote into the Constitution has ensured that it will be protected. One hundred and six years after this amendment was ratified, the so-called SAVE —Safeguard American Voter Eligibility—Act would undermine the right of women to vote.
The official goal of the bill is to tighten voter security. Critics, including the League of Women Voters, have been quick to point out that its actual effect will be to disenfranchise millions of voters, with the brunt of the impact falling on women.
Here’s a quote from the LWV’s condemnation of the proposed legislation: “Under the false banner of ‘election integrity,’ lawmakers are advancing policies designed to block lawful voters from participating in our elections—particularly rural voters, voters of color, and nearly 70 million married women who have changed their last names, along with other voters who have been historically marginalized and already face barriers to casting a ballot. This is modern-day voter suppression, plain and simple.”
The League of Women Voters was founded in 1920, just six months before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. The founders were suffragists from the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The organization remains nonpartisan and impartial. LWV’s perspective on any issue is worth considering. On this issue, it carries the weight of more than 100 years of history and the warning is clear. The SAVE Act will disenfranchise millions of women voters.
“No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent,” wrote celebrated American social reformer and women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony, shortly before her death in 1906. Critics of the SAVE Act point out that governing women without their consent seems to be this piece of legislation’s real goal.
Women voters are also the target of the tech industry. Just this month, Alex Karp, the CEO of the tech firm Palantir, stated that his company’s AI technology can target educated female voters, with the goal of reducing their ability to vote and exert influence while increasing the power of “working-class men.”
He sounds a lot like the nineteenth-century opponents of women’s rights who threatened that men would be emasculated and left with the housework if women were able to vote.
“Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it,” wrote British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914, objecting to the same kind of argument. “They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.”
More than a hundred years later, the fight goes on.
The US Senate is expected to vote on the SAVE Act later this week. As of this writing, there are not enough votes to pass the bill, and the Republican majority seems unlikely to eliminate the filibuster to facilitate passage of this piece of legislation, but all bets are off. The outcome remains to be seen.
