After the amendment
The Americans who still could not vote after 1920 were kept out by rules that said nothing about sex: Black women in the southern states, by poll taxes, literacy tests and the registration practices built around them; Native American women, who were not uniformly citizens until 1924; and Asian American women born outside the United States, who could not naturalize until the statutes of 1943 and 1952.
The Nineteenth Amendment was certified on 26 August 1920, it removed sex as a lawful reason to deny the vote, and it removed nothing else, which is why the dates that addressed those other exclusions run from 1924 to 1965. The women's rights movement of the 1960s was a later and separate campaign from the one that won the vote, and it exists as a separate campaign partly because ratification ended one exclusion from the ballot and left several others standing.
What the Nineteenth Amendment accomplished, and where the campaign had started
The Nineteenth Amendment accomplished exactly one thing, and its complete text says what that was:
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 demand behind that sentence was seventy two years old. It was made in writing at the Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848, in the ninth of eleven resolutions, and it was the only resolution of the eleven that did not pass unanimously. Frederick Douglass, around 1818 to 1895, spoke for it, and it carried by a narrow margin. That is how Douglass contributed to the women's rights movement: he argued for the franchise resolution at the convention that first demanded it, at a moment when the convention itself was divided about asking.
The campaign that followed ran through the split of 1869, the trial of Susan B. Anthony at Canandaigua in June 1873, the merger of 1890, the Woman Suffrage Procession of 3 March 1913 and the White House picket that began in January 1917, until Congress passed the amendment on 4 June 1919 and Tennessee ratified as the thirty sixth state on 18 August 1920. The campaign for the vote therefore has a start date and an end date. The wider movement for women's legal and economic standing has neither.
Who still could not vote after 1920
The barriers that survived 1920 were written without reference to sex, which is why the Nineteenth Amendment did not reach them. In the southern states the machinery was built to disfranchise Black voters of both sexes and it worked on Black women from the day the amendment was certified.
| Barrier | How it worked | When it was addressed |
|---|---|---|
| Poll tax | A fee required before registration, sometimes cumulative, payable well before the election | 1964, for federal elections, by the Twenty Fourth Amendment |
| Literacy and understanding tests | A reading or interpretation test administered by a local registrar with discretion over who passed | 1965, by the Voting Rights Act |
| Registrar discretion and residency rules | Registration held at limited times and places, with proof requirements applied unevenly | 1965, by the Voting Rights Act |
| Exclusion from citizenship | A person who could not be a citizen could not vote, whatever the Nineteenth Amendment said | 1924, 1943 and 1952, by three separate statutes |
Citizenship first: 1924, 1943 and 1952
Citizenship was the prior question for three groups of American women, because the Nineteenth Amendment protects the right of citizens of the United States and no one else. Native American women were made citizens by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and citizenship did not by itself produce registration, since state and local barriers to Native voting persisted afterward.
Chinese exclusion was repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, and the racial bar to naturalization was removed by the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952. Until those statutes, Asian American women born outside the United States could not naturalize, could not be citizens, and were therefore outside the amendment entirely. The suffrage campaign had argued the vote as a right of citizenship, and these are the cases where the argument was answered by controlling who counted as a citizen.
1964 and 1965: the poll tax and the Voting Rights Act
The poll tax and the literacy test were dismantled in the mid 1960s, long after the Nineteenth Amendment. The Twenty Fourth Amendment abolished the poll tax in federal elections in 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 went at the literacy and understanding tests and at the registration practices that had made them effective, and it did so with federal enforcement rather than by leaving the remedy to the states that had built the system.
Mary Church Terrell, 1863 to 1954, had described that system from the inside long before either measure. She delivered What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States in Washington in 1906, she had been the first president of the National Association of Colored Women from 1896, and she was still picketing segregated Washington restaurants in the early 1950s, in her eighties. Her career runs across the whole of this gap: she campaigned for the amendment, lived through its limits, and was still working when the limits were being removed.
The women's movement of the 1960s, and why it is a different campaign
The women's movement of the 1960s took up subjects the suffrage campaign had either set aside or lost, chiefly employment, pay, credit, education and the legal standing of married women. It is often called a second wave, with the campaign that ended in 1920 as the first, and the label is useful as long as it is not read as continuity of organization. The National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party belonged to the earlier campaign; the organizations of the 1960s were new, and the reading public they addressed had been voting all their adult lives.
What the two campaigns share is a method rather than a membership. Both argued in public and in print, and both left a documentary record that can be read directly, which is why what was actually said at the conventions of the nineteenth century remains the most reliable account of what the earlier campaign wanted. Sojourner Truth, around 1797 to 1883, and Susan B. Anthony, 1820 to 1906, did not live to see 1920, let alone the 1960s. Reading either decade back into their speeches is where most of the errors about them begin.