The Nineteenth Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is a single sentence of law, ratified in 1920, that forbids the United States and any State from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of sex.
Congress passed it on 4 June 1919. Ratification was completed when Tennessee became the thirty sixth state to approve it on 18 August 1920, and the amendment was certified on 26 August 1920. The demand it answers was put in writing at Seneca Falls in 1848, seventy two years earlier. What the amendment does is narrower than most summaries suggest, and that difference is the whole subject.
What the Nineteenth Amendment says, in full
The Nineteenth Amendment says two things, and the document is short enough to read entire rather than in summary:
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.
The first sentence is a prohibition, binding on the states and on the federal government alike. The second is an enforcement clause, which lets Congress pass statutes to make the first sentence work, the same construction used in the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870. That is the complete document, and a great deal of what is said about it goes wrong in the same particular way.
Is women's suffrage the same thing as the Nineteenth Amendment?
No. Women's suffrage is the campaign; the Nineteenth Amendment is the one legal instrument that campaign secured at the end of it. Keeping them apart matters for two reasons. Women were already voting in parts of the country long before 1920, because Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, fifty one years ahead of the amendment, and other western states followed. And some women were still being turned away from the polls long after 1920, for reasons the amendment does not reach. A student meeting the term in an APUSH course is usually being asked about both at once: the movement that ran from 1848 onward, and the constitutional text of 1920 it produced.
What the amendment did, and the word it does not contain
The amendment did one thing exactly: it struck sex off the list of reasons a state may give for refusing a citizen a ballot. It did not grant, give or confer the vote, and those three words appear nowhere in the text. That is the most common misreading of the document: the distance between granting a right and forbidding one reason for denying it is the distance between what happened in 1920 and what most people think happened.
Under the Constitution the states, not Congress, set the qualifications of voters. The Nineteenth Amendment does not take that power away from them. It removes one use of it. From 26 August 1920 no state could any longer point to a woman's sex as its reason for keeping her off the register. Every other qualification on a state's books, and every rule governing how it was administered, stayed where it was.
Who could still be turned away after 26 August 1920
Black women in the South were the largest group the amendment did not reach. The southern states had spent the fifty years since the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 building machinery to keep Black men from voting without naming race as the reason: poll taxes, literacy and understanding tests, and registration rules administered at the discretion of a local official. None of it mentioned sex, so none of it was touched by an amendment that forbids denial on account of sex and nothing else. Black women in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and across the South met the same tests their fathers and husbands had, and the federal law that dismantled them came decades later.
Citizenship was the other barrier. The amendment protects citizens of the United States, so a non-citizen stood outside it altogether. Native American women were not universally citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, four years after the amendment was certified. Asian immigrants were kept out by the naturalization laws: the Magnuson Act of 1943 repealed Chinese exclusion, and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 removed the racial bar to naturalization.
| Barrier to voting | Whom it kept out | When federal law removed it |
|---|---|---|
| Poll taxes | Poor voters generally, used systematically against Black voters in the South | Twenty Fourth Amendment, 1964, in federal elections |
| Literacy tests and discretionary registration | Black voters in the South, women and men alike | Voting Rights Act, 1965 |
| Citizenship withheld from Native Americans | Native American women and men | Indian Citizenship Act, 1924 |
| Chinese exclusion | Chinese immigrants, through the bar on naturalization | Magnuson Act, 1943 |
| Racial bar to naturalization | Asian immigrants generally | McCarran-Walter Act, 1952 |
None of that is a complaint about the drafting. It is what the amendment is: a prohibition on one ground of exclusion, in a system that had several.
The seventy two years behind one sentence
Seventy two years separate the demand from the text, and the chronology explains the narrow wording. The demand was made at Seneca Falls on 19 and 20 July 1848, where eleven resolutions were put. Ten carried unanimously. The ninth, which asked women to secure to themselves the elective franchise, did not: Frederick Douglass spoke for it and it carried by a narrow margin. The first National Woman's Rights Convention met at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, and Sojourner Truth spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on 29 May 1851, in a speech that survives in two very different texts.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, put the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the clause on apportionment:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
That word split the campaign. The American Equal Rights Association, formed in 1866 to press for the vote for Black Americans and for women together, broke apart over the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, which forbade denial of the vote on account of race. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed it, and the terms in which they argued against it were explicitly racist and were printed. In May 1869 they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association; in November 1869 Lucy Stone and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two did not reunite until 1890, as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester, New York on 5 November 1872, was arrested on 18 November, and was convicted at Canandaigua in June 1873 by Justice Ward Hunt, who directed the verdict rather than let the jury decide and fined her one hundred dollars. The later campaign then worked both roads at once: Carrie Chapman Catt presented the Winning Plan in 1916, coordinating state campaigns with the push in Congress, while from January 1917 the Silent Sentinels picketed the White House for about two and a half years and were arrested, imprisoned and force fed. What was actually said across those decades, in the conventions and from the platforms, is the part of the record that survives best.