The 19th Amendment is a short Article to the U.S. Constitution which reads that 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. It was passed by the House of Representatives in 1919 by a vote of 304 to 90. In the Senate this Amendment was ultimately ratified on August 18, 1920 by a vote of 56 to 25.

From the time the United States came into being, women were almost entirely excluded from voting. Such exclusion was finally made explicit as soon as women began to show their irritation at this restriction. The Woman suffrage movement started in the early 19th century during the tumult around slavery. Such outstanding reformers as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showed a keen interest in the antislavery movement and turned out to be respectable public speakers. When they joined the antislavery forces, they agreed that the rights of women, not only those of slaves, needed amendments. In July 1848 these two suffragists issued a call for a convention on the women’s rights issue. This convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19-20, and ended with a Declaration of Sentiments calling for woman suffrage, as well as for their right to educational and employment opportunities. This declaration was based on the Declaration of Independence, and it said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. …”

Suffrage soon turned out to be the primary goal of the women’s rights movement. Suffragists had a firm belief that if women gained the right to vote, they could use it to gain other rights. However, they encountered strong opposition.

Those in opposition to woman suffrage movement were convinced that women were less intelligent and less able to make political decisions than men. They believed that wives could not represent themselves better that men could represent their wives. There were people who had a fear that women’s participation in politics would lead to the end of family life.

Seneca Falls Convention brought about the first national convention of the women’s suffrage movement, held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, by Lucy Stone and a group of prominent Eastern suffragists. One more convention, held in Syracuse, New York, in 1852, was the event of the first common undertaking between Stanton and the active suffragist reformers Susan B. Anthony; together these two leaders headed the American suffragist movement for the next 50 years.

After the suffrage movement gained its mass support, other woman suffrage conventions were held . However, women were still prevented from voting except by amendments to the constitutions of the several states. After the American Civil War (1861-65) several attempts were made in this direction, but although the Territory of Wyoming gave women the right to vote in all elections in 1869, it soon became apparent that an amendment of the federal Constitution would be a desirable plan. In accordance to this plan, in 1869 Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association with the declared goal of granting the ballot for women by an amendment to the Constitution. They held a convention every year for 50 years after its founding. In 1869 the American Woman Suffrage Association, another organization, was founded by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and other more conservative activists with the object of securing woman suffrage by obtaining amendments to that effect in the constitutions of the various states. In 1890 these two associations joined together under the name National American Woman Suffrage Association and functioned for almost 30 years.

As soon as Wyoming joined the Union in 1890, it became the first state whose constitution granted women the right to vote. Later on, dynamic campaigns were held to make state legislatures submit to their voters amendments to state constitutions granting full suffrage to women in state affairs. In addition to this, attempts were made to grant women the right to vote in presidential elections and, in some states, the right to vote in municipal and local elections. In the following twenty-five years several states gave in to the demands of women suffrage movement’s and granted their women ther right to vote. Moreover, they increased the number of Congress members elected partially by women, and in such a way, these members by the nature of their constituency had to support a woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution of the US. By 1918 there were already 15 states that enfranchised their women.

One more factor that helped to demolish most of the remaining opposition to woman enfranchisement in the United States was World War I, and the major role played in it by women in various capacities. In 1878 Woman suffrage amendments to the federal Constitution had been introduced into Congress by Senator A.A. Sargent (California), but it had been totally defeated. In 1914 this amendment was reintroduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate, but it failed to gain even a simple majority of the votes as a two-thirds majority vote in Congress was needed for the amendment to be sent for ratification. Nevertheless, by 1918, both major political parties became supporters of woman enfranchisement, and finally on January 10, 1918 The House voted 274 to 136, precisely two-thirds in favor of a woman suffrage amendment. The Nineteenth Amendmend was then passed by the Senate 56 to 25, with only two votes to spare on June 4, 1919 and sent to the states for ratification.

Forceful efforts were made to ensure ratification of the amendment by two-thirds of the state legislatures, and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the woman suffrage amendment.

The Nineteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, granting women the right to vote on August 26, 1919. This is how Carrie Chapman Catt summed up the effort involved in ensuring the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment:

“To get the word “male” in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign… During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”

Susan B. Anthony and Her Role in the American Suffrage Movement

Susan B. Anthony was one of those pioneers of feminism who were well aware of gender discrimination, and fought vehemently for their freedom. Having a strong belief in the ordinary ability of a person to produce significant changes in themselves and their environment, she openly criticized institutions and ideologies that had been previously taken for granted, which led to the revolutionary change in the fabric of our society. If not for her, the ultimate passage of the Nineteenth Amendment would be probably delayed for many years.

Born on February 15, 1820 in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts, Susan B. Anthony was the daughter of Lucy Read Anthony and Daniel Anthony, a cotton-mill owner. Although Susan was the second born of eight children only she and her sister, Mary, lived to adulthood. Unlike other women who fought for the right to vote in national elections, she was not drawn to women’s rights by her instinct as she was raised in a family that believed in equality between the sexes and applied reformist values to their own lives. Her father lived in accordance with Quaker beliefs, and tried to instill in his children the ideas of self-reliance, self-discipline, and self-worth. He prevented his children from things such as toys, games and music, feeling that they would distract his children from reaching their peak of performance. He was also a liberal thinker who strongly supported the abolitionist (antislavery) and the temperance (avoidance of alcohol) movements. Antislavery talks were an almost daily conversations over the dinner table. Besides, he believed in education, even for women, and added a room to their house to serve as a school for his own and other children. Since Quakers believed in the importance of work, Susan worked in her father’s factory while attending school.
Strongly influenced by her father, Susan became a very bright student. She knew how to read and write at the age of three. At the age of six Susan was put in a home school type school setting because her teacher refused to teach her how to do long division. Run by a very strong-willed women, this school gave Susan a new image of womanhood by being taught not only arithmetic and grammar, but also manners and self-worth. Upon leaving this school, Susan attended a boarding school in Philadelphia.

Susan B. Anthony started teaching in schools of New York state at the age of 17, after having completed her schooling. It was the time when a woman could not merely decide to work alongside a man. Women were still viewed in the context of motherhood and marriage. Women were still expected to have the sacred duty of a woman to be a good wife and mother. The profession of a teacher was one of the few professions open to women at the time as it was considered to be similar to motherhood. The teaching profesion gave them a chance to establish their own identities by gaining economic independence. However, there was a great difference between teaching wages of men and teaching wages of women. Susan B. Anthony “s weekly salary was equal to only one-fifth of that received by male teachers. In the long run, she refused to accept such inequality, and expressed her angry protest, which made her unemployed. After that Susan started working as a principal for the Girls” Department of the Canajoharie Academy in Canajoharie, New York.

Susan B. Anthony continued teaching till 1849, when her father asked her to come home to run the family farm so that he could spend more time trying to develop an insurance business. Hearing the talks of such famous reformers as Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), and Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), who used to visit Anthony’s father during this time, helped Susan form her strong views on slavery, women’s rights, and temperance (the avoidance of alcohol).

In 1848, Lucy Read Anthony and Daniel Anthony and Susan’s sister attended the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Susan, who joined them shortly after, became indignant when she discovered that even in the reformist groups a woman’s voice was not heard. As a result of her negative experiences with public speaking at the Seneca Falls, and of her awareness of lower pay for women teachers, Susan organized the women’s rights movement in 1850. She focused primarily on property rights of married women and woman suffrage, organizing women to sign petitions. She celebrated her first success in 1860 when the legislature granted married women the right to retain their own earnings and file court suits.

After the Civil War the country’s focus shifted to emancipation. Susan B. Anthony became more focused on woman suffrage because she saw that suffragists working for “Negro” suffrage were not going to give the voting right to women. In 1866 she became one of the founders of the American Equal Rights Association, and two years later she launched the publishing of Revolution. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, with Stanton as president and Anthony at her side. This Association adopted the radical position by opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, which gives blacks the right to vote. It eventually merged with American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.

After the adoption of 15th Amendment, Anthony decided to test its language by voting in the 1872 presidential election. The governmental officials not only were unwilling to take her vote into consideration, they also had her arrested. Anthony was tried and convicted in U.S. District Court without a jury. What was even worse, the opinion had been written by the judge before the trial. Susan refused to pay the fine; however, no further legal action was taken. “This government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex . . . which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.” (Stanton and Anthony, 162). These are the words Susan B. Anthony spoke after she was arrested with her sister, Mary, and fourteen other women.

In her later years, Susan B. Anthony retired retiring from active leadership of the suffrage movement and turned over presidency of the NAWSA to Carrie Chapman Catt. She also worked with Stanton and Mathilda Gage on a History of Woman Suffrage.

However, some of Susan B. Anthony’s works were quite racist by today’s standards, particularly those written during the time when she was angry that the Fifteenth Amendment wrote the word “male” into the constitution for the first time in permitting suffrage for freedmen. She was trying to prove that educated white women would be better voters than “ignorant” black men or immigrant men.

In the late 1860s Anthony even declared that the vote of freedmen threatens the safety of white women. George Francis Train, whose money helped launch Anthony and Stanton’s Revolution newspaper, was a noted racist.

The last years Anthony spent working on her memoirs, Life of Susan Anthony. She dreamt to see women vote in two nations, New Zealand and Australia. In 1906 she died of heart disease and pneumonia of both lungs, before the enfranchisement of women in the United States.

Susan B. Anthony was truly one of the greatest women of all time. She was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1950, and in 1979, her image was chosen for the new dollar coin, making her the first woman to be depicted on US currency.

Women’s Citizenship and Civic Standing after the Adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920

Surprisingly, the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution after a seventy-two year struggle, which was supposed to be a monumental change in the constitution of the polity, left little effect on American politics. The exhausting struggle of suffragists for political incorporation didn’t bring about their ideal of women inclusion as “full” citizens.

Nevertheless, having been granted the right to vote in 1920, women had their political standing changed. Before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women citizenship that was universally based upon marital status. However, regardless of their marital status, women were considered to be dependent citizens, and their relation to the state was mediated by men. Although women acquired their civic position within the public realm as voters after 1920, their new status continued to be underdeveloped and unclear as the rules of marital status still animated women’s citizenship outside the electoral realm. What the Nineteenth Amendment managed to achieve was the reducing the gender distinctiveness of citizenship without creating equal citizenship for women.

It succeeded in displacing one citizenship ideal for women but failed to replace it with another. Prior to the the Nineteenth Amendment, the civic standing of women was governed by the coverture, the status of a married woman under a common law. Although women were regarded as citizens, they couldn’t get inside the public sphere because they were seen as domestically rooted. Concerning African American women, they were doubly prevented from entering the public realm, as they had no independent status that was equated with whiteness. The Nineteenth Amendment granted white women and some black women clear political position in the public realm, but didn’t succeed in establishing equal citizenship as the new dominating ideal.

At the time when women reformers first fought vehemently for their constitutional right to vote, citizenship was firmly related to franchise. The political life of the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by high turnout rate, very competetive elections, and incredibly strong partisan ties. After 1920, when women secured the right to vote, elections were mostly noncompetitive with virtual one-party rule in many areas. Turnout rate became low, and the intensity of partisan ties had decreased. The government was moving toward a bureaucratic, interest group based governing system in which voting was less central to citizenship. Partisan competition was dampened by these changes in electoral politics, which resulted from a political realignment and from changes in the organization of government that lessened the importance of the parties. Of course, the right to vote remained important enough for women and other social groups to seek it. However, it mattered less than it had in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

In spite of this, women reformers in the 1920s declared that partially the vote still mattered because of its effect on women’s political position and self-esteem. Some women activists praised the educational effect of the Nineteenth Amendment, while others spoke of it with reference to recognition and justice. There were also those who indicated the loss of momentum and the lack of independent women’s leadership in the postsuffrage era. However, in general these women were convinced that the Amendment had changed their position as citizens regardless of how it was used, or whether it was used.

After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment many Americans thought that women enriched political life with a gendered sensibility and that they were less partisan and self-interested in their outlooks. Furthermore, they were also considered to be adherents of a whole series of social welfare measures such as child labor legislation, temperance, education, and maternity and infant health care provision. Moreover, it was believed that women’s political outlooks were local, since they were animated by women’s practical experience.

It should be noted that although politically gendered, women were notified not to form a separate political block. This is how Margaret Woodrow Wilson commented on this issue, “After demanding the right to vote as their right as men’s equals and because they wanted to take their part with men in public affairs, it is dishonest for women to act as if they were not citizens along with men but a class apart.”(Ritter, 353)

The Nineteenth Amendment established that liberal citizenship was under the most favorable circumstances an imperfect vehicle for the political articulation and mobilization of women. During the period of suffrage struggle, the right to vote was considered by many to be the central right of citizenship. When women were granted the right to vote, they were supposed to be full citizens. However, this did not happen.

The Nineteenth Amendment managed to establish a new standing for women as equal individuals within the political sphere. It should be admitted that there were substantial changes in the laws governing married women as the presumption of equality in the political sphere, though it was narrowly construed constitutionally, had a normative influence on lawmakers and judges. However, it was still believed that wives owed their husbands access to their sexuality and various forms of domestic service. The principle under which husbands chose the family domicile still took place. Furthermore, in the courtroom husbands and wives could not testify about marital communications. Thus, there were areas, in which the status of wife remained civilly relevant, and the notion of marital unity, though limited, still mattered.

References

Anthony, Susan B. History of Woman Suffrage, Fowler & Wells Publishers, 1881.

Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography, New York University Press, 1988.

Gretchen Ritter. Gender and Citizenship after the Nineteenth Amendment.Polity, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring, 2000), pp. 345-375

Stanton Elizabeth C., Susan B. Anthony. Correspondence, Writings, Speeches Ed. by Ellen C. DuBois; New York, Shocken Books : 1981, pp. 152- 165.