Ratification, August 1920
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920, the day Tennessee became the thirty sixth state to approve it and so completed ratification, and it was certified as part of the Constitution eight days later, on 26 August 1920.
Congress had passed it and sent it out to the states more than a year earlier, on 4 June 1919. Readers who want a single date usually want one of those three, and they answer different questions.
Three dates, and which one is the answer
Ratification has three dates because an amendment reaches the Constitution in three separate steps, and popular accounts collapse them. Congress acts first. The states act next, one legislature at a time, until enough of them have agreed. An officer of the federal government then certifies that the threshold has been met, and only at that point does the text become law.
| Date | What happened | The question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 4 June 1919 | Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment and sends it to the states | When did the amendment pass? |
| 18 August 1920 | Tennessee ratifies, the thirty sixth state, completing ratification | When was the amendment ratified? |
| 26 August 1920 | The amendment is certified and takes effect | When did women's suffrage become law? |
An examiner asking when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified wants 18 August 1920. An examiner asking when it became part of the Constitution wants 26 August 1920. Writing 1920 alone is correct and answers neither precisely.
How the thirty six ratifications were collected, and why that took more than a year
Thirty six was not a target the campaign picked. The Constitution fixes the threshold for an amendment as a proportion of the states rather than as a set number, so thirty six was simply what that proportion came to in 1920, and Tennessee supplied it. Each state acted through its own legislature, on its own calendar, in its own political weather. Some legislatures were already in session in the summer of 1919 and voted within weeks. Others were not due to meet for months and had to be called into special session, at the governor's discretion, which meant that a state's position on woman suffrage and a state's willingness to pay for an extra session were two different obstacles. Opposition was concentrated and it was organized: legislatures in the South were the hardest ground, and the campaign ran out of easy states before it ran out of states it needed.
That is why the last ratification was a fight rather than a formality. By August 1920 the count stood one state short, and Tennessee was the legislature in reach. It ratified on 18 August 1920. The certification followed on 26 August 1920.
Is women's suffrage the same as the Nineteenth Amendment being ratified?
No, and the ratification date is a poor proxy for when American women got the vote. Women had been voting in parts of the country for half a century already, since Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869. And ratification did not put every woman on the register, because the Nineteenth Amendment forbids denial of the vote on account of sex and nothing else. Poll taxes, literacy tests and the discretionary registration rules used across the South applied on their face to everyone, so ratification left all of them standing, and Black women in those states went on being turned away. The Twenty Fourth Amendment of 1964 removed the poll tax in federal elections and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reached the tests. Native American women were not universally citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, four years after certification, and the amendment protects citizens.
Why ratification came when it did
Ratification came in 1919 and 1920 because the campaign had spent the previous decade building pressure on Congress and on the state legislatures at the same time. Carrie Chapman Catt presented the Winning Plan in 1916, which set the National American Woman Suffrage Association to work on both fronts at once rather than treating the state road and the federal road as alternatives. Alice Paul had already organized the Woman Suffrage Procession through Washington on 3 March 1913, the day before Wilson's inauguration, and the Congressional Union she formed that year became the National Woman's Party in 1916. From January 1917 the Silent Sentinels picketed the White House, and kept it up for about two and a half years, during which pickets were arrested, imprisoned and force fed while on hunger strike. The argument was also being made in places other than suffrage meetings: Florence Kelley spoke in Philadelphia on 22 July 1905 on child labor and the vote, tying the ballot to the conditions in which women and children worked, and the National Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, carried the same case into the labor movement.
Who did not live to see it
Most of the people who began the campaign were dead before it was ratified, which is the plainest measure of how long it took. The demand had been written down at Seneca Falls in 1848, seventy two years before certification.
- Lucretia Mott, who met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, died in 1880.
- Sojourner Truth, who spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron on 29 May 1851, died in 1883.
- Frederick Douglass, who spoke for the ninth resolution at Seneca Falls, died in 1895.
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902.
- Susan B. Anthony, who voted in Rochester on 5 November 1872 and was tried for it before Justice Ward Hunt in June 1873, died in 1906.
- Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1904 to 1915, died in 1919, the year Congress passed the amendment.
Carrie Chapman Catt, who lived until 1947, and Alice Paul, who lived until 1977, were among the leaders who saw the result of their own work. Mary Church Terrell, a founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, was still picketing segregated restaurants in Washington in the early 1950s, in her eighties, which is a fair indication of how much the ratification of 1920 had and had not settled.