Seventy two years
The Nineteenth Amendment took seventy two years, from the demand written down at Seneca Falls in July 1848 to certification on 26 August 1920, because the vote had to be won twice over at the same time: state by state in one legislature after another, and in Congress, against opposition that was organized and well funded, through a civil war, and across a split that divided the movement against itself from 1869 to 1890.
That is also why the amendment matters. It is a clause of the Constitution produced by a campaign that argued in public for seventy two years before it got a single sentence.
Two roads to the vote, and why both had to be traveled
The two roads to the vote were the states and the Constitution, and neither one worked on its own. Under the American system the states set the qualifications of voters, so a state could enfranchise women without asking anyone's permission, and Wyoming Territory did exactly that in 1869. That road was real, and it was slow, and it stopped: the states most willing to move were in the West, and the campaign ran out of them long before it had a majority of the country. The federal road, a constitutional amendment, needed a supermajority in each house of Congress and then thirty six state legislatures, which meant the campaign had to win in the very states that had refused to act on their own.
So the suffrage movement fought on both roads at once for most of its life, and the two efforts competed for the same money and the same organizers. That competition is a large part of the answer to how long the movement lasted. Only in 1916, when Carrie Chapman Catt presented the Winning Plan, was the effort deliberately coordinated so that state campaigns were chosen for what they would deliver in Congress rather than pursued for their own sake.
The war years, and the amendment that put the word male in the Constitution
The war years cost the campaign more than the years they occupied. Woman's rights conventions had been meeting regularly since the first National Woman's Rights Convention at Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, and the leaders suspended that work during the Civil War to campaign for emancipation, on the understanding that the two causes would be carried together afterward. The American Equal Rights Association, formed in 1866, was that understanding in institutional form: one organization pressing for the vote for Black Americans and for women at once.
It did not hold. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, wrote the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in its clause on apportionment:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
Until then the Constitution had left the question of sex to the states without naming it. Now the federal text itself distinguished male citizens, and any future claim that women were already covered had a plain answer against it. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, forbade denial of the vote on account of race and said nothing about sex.
The twenty one year split, 1869 to 1890
The split ran for twenty one years and it began over the Fifteenth Amendment. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opposed the amendment because it enfranchised Black men and not women, and the terms in which they argued against it were explicitly racist and appeared in print. Lucy Stone and others took the opposite position and supported it. In May 1869 Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. In November 1869 Stone and her allies formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. The two bodies ran separate campaigns and separate strategies until they merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
| National Woman Suffrage Association | American Woman Suffrage Association | |
|---|---|---|
| Formed | May 1869 | November 1869 |
| Principal figures | Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony | Lucy Stone and others |
| Position on the Fifteenth Amendment | Opposed it | Supported it |
| Main road pursued | A federal amendment | State by state campaigns |
| Ended | Merged in 1890 | Merged in 1890 |
Who organized against it
Organized opposition, not public indifference, is what made each state campaign expensive. The liquor trade was the most consistent opponent, because suffragists and the temperance movement overlapped heavily and a trade facing prohibition read votes for women as votes for its own destruction. State political machines opposed suffrage for a simpler reason: they had counted their electorates and did not want them doubled by voters they had no hold over. In the South, opposition ran through the argument about states' rights and through the fear that a federal voting amendment of any kind would invite federal attention to how elections there were already being run. Women organized against suffrage too, in societies formed for the purpose, and their existence is a useful correction to any account that treats the campaign as a march with only one side.
What the seventy two years bought, and who was still excluded
The seventy two years bought one sentence of constitutional text, and that sentence forbids denial of the vote on account of sex. It does not touch anything else. Poll taxes, literacy and understanding tests, and registration rules administered at the discretion of local officials mentioned neither sex nor race, and every one of them survived 26 August 1920 intact. Black women in the South met the same machinery that had kept Black men from voting since the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, and it took the Twenty Fourth Amendment of 1964 to remove the poll tax from federal elections and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to reach the tests. Native American women were not universally citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and the amendment protects citizens of the United States. The naturalization laws kept Asian immigrants out until the Magnuson Act of 1943 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952.
The Nineteenth Amendment is therefore important for something more specific than the usual summary allows. It ended one named reason for refusal, in a country that had many, after seventy two years of argument in public, and the arguments themselves survive. Mary Church Terrell, who founded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and was still picketing segregated restaurants in Washington in the early 1950s, spent her working life on both halves of that gap.