what was the 19th amendment to the constitution

The 19th Subpoena to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the correct to vote, a right known as women's suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending about a century of protest. In 1848, the movement for women'southward rights launched on a national level with the Seneca Falls Convention, organized past Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Following the convention, the demand for the vote became a centerpiece of the women'southward rights movement. Stanton and Mott, along with Susan B. Anthony and other activists, raised public awareness and lobbied the regime to grant voting rights to women. After a lengthy boxing, these groups finally emerged victorious with the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Despite the passage of the subpoena and the decades-long contributions of Black women to achieve suffrage, poll taxes, local laws and other restrictions continued to block women of color from voting. Black men and women besides faced intimidation and often violent opposition at the polls or when attempting to register to vote. It would take more than 40 years for all women to reach voting equality.

Watch: Women'south History Documentaries on HISTORY Vault

Women's Suffrage

During America's early history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male person citizens.

For example, married women couldn't ain property and had no legal claim to any coin they might earn, and no female person had the correct to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and maternity, not politics.

The entrada for women's suffrage was a pocket-size only growing motility in the decades before the Ceremonious War. Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated across the U.S. including temperance leagues, the abolitionist movement and religious groups. Women played a prominent role in a number of them.

Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the platonic woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to exist a adult female and a citizen in the United States.

READ MORE: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women's Right to Vote

Seneca Falls Convention

Information technology was not until 1848 that the movement for women's rights began to organize at the national level.

In July of that year, reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women'south rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York (where Stanton lived). More than 300 people—by and large women, only also some men—attended, including sometime African-American slave and activist Frederick Douglass.

In improver to their belief that women should be afforded better opportunities for didactics and employment, most of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their ain political identities.

Announcement of Sentiments

A group of delegates led by Stanton produced a "Declaration of Sentiments" document, modeled afterwards the Proclamation of Independence, which stated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, amidst other things, was that the delegates believed women should have the right to vote.

Post-obit the convention, the idea of voting rights for women was mocked in the press and some delegates withdrew their back up for the Announcement of Sentiments. Nonetheless, Stanton and Mott persisted—they went on to spearhead additional women'due south rights conferences and they were eventually joined in their advancement work past Susan B. Anthony and other activists.

WATCH: Susan B. Anthony and the Long Push button for Women's Suffrage

National Suffrage Groups Established

With the onset of the Civil State of war, the suffrage movement lost some momentum, every bit many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the disharmonize between the states.

After the war, women'due south suffrage endured another setback, when the women's rights movement found itself divided over the consequence of voting rights for Black men. Stanton and some other suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Subpoena to the U.S. Constitution, which would give Black men the right to vote, merely failed to extend the same privilege to American women of whatever skin color.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Clan (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.

That same year, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Clan (AWSA); the group'south leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not laissez passer if it included voting rights for women. (The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.)

The AWSA believed women's enfranchisement could best exist gained through amendments to individual country constitutions. Despite the divisions between the two organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the right to vote. (When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, women's suffrage remained part of the state constitution.)

By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage move had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S. Congress for a ramble amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to written report and contend the issue. Even so, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to course the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization's strategy was to lobby for women's voting rights on a state-by-state basis. Within half-dozen years, Colorado, Utah and Idaho adopted amendments to their state constitutions granting women the right to vote. In 1900, with Stanton and Anthony advancing in age, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped upwards to atomic number 82 NAWSA.

Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

During argue over the 15th Amendment, white suffragist leaders similar Stanton and Anthony had argued fiercely against Black men getting the vote before white women. Such a opinion led to a pause with their abolitionist allies, like Douglass, and ignored the distinct viewpoints and goals of Blackness women, led by prominent activists like Sojourner Truth and Frances Due east.W. Harper, fighting alongside them for the right to vote.

As the fight for voting rights continued, Black women in the suffrage movement connected to experience discrimination from white suffragists who wanted to distance their fight for voting rights from the question of race.

Roll to Continue

Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Clan of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 past a group of women including Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. They fought hard for the passage of the 19th Subpoena, seeing the women'south right to vote equally a crucial tool to winning legal protections for Black women (as well equally Blackness men) against continued repression and violence.

READ More: five Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th Amendment

Land-level Successes for Voting Rights

The plow of the 20th century brought renewed momentum to the women's suffrage crusade. Although the deaths of Stanton in 1902 and Anthony in 1906 appeared to be setbacks, the NASWA nether the leadership of Catt achieved rolling successes for women's enfranchisement at land levels.

Betwixt 1910 and 1918, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Due north Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington extended voting rights to women.

Also during this time, through the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women'southward Political Marriage), Stanton's daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced parades, pickets and marches as means of calling attention to the crusade. These tactics succeeded in raising awareness and led to unrest in Washington, D.C.

Protest and Progress

On the eve of the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, protesters thronged a massive suffrage parade in the nation's uppercase, and hundreds of women were injured. That same year, Alice Paul founded the Congressional Marriage for Woman Suffrage, which later became the National Woman's Political party.

The organisation staged numerous demonstrations and regularly picketed the White House, among other militant tactics. As a upshot of these actions, some group members were arrested and served jail time.

In 1918, President Wilson switched his stand on women's voting rights from objection to support through the influence of Catt, who had a less-antagonistic fashion than Paul. Wilson also tied the proposed suffrage subpoena to America's involvement in Earth War I and the increased role women had played in the state of war efforts.

When the amendment came up for vote, Wilson addressed the Senate in favor of suffrage. As reported in The New York Times on October ane, 1918, Wilson said, "I regard the extension of suffrage to women every bit vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the dandy war of humanity in which we are engaged."

However, despite Wilson'south newfound support, the subpoena proposal failed in the Senate by two votes. Another year passed before Congress took upwards the measure again.

READ MORE: The Women Who Fought for the Vote

The Last Struggle For Passage

On May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Isle of mann, a Republican from Illinois and chairman of the Suffrage Commission, proposed the Firm resolution to approve the Susan Anthony Amendment granting women the right to vote. The measure out passed the Firm 304 to 89—a full 42 votes to a higher place the required ii-thirds majority.

Two weeks subsequently, on June four, 1919, the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Subpoena by two votes over its two-thirds required majority, 56-25. The amendment was and so sent to the states for ratification.

Inside vi days of the ratification bicycle, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin each ratified the subpoena. Kansas, New York and Ohio followed on June sixteen, 1919. Past March of the following year, a total of 35 states had approved the amendment, just shy of the three-fourths required for ratification.

Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia—had already rejected information technology before Tennessee's vote on August eighteen, 1920. It was up to Tennessee to tip the scale for woman suffrage.

The outlook appeared bleak, given the outcomes in other Southern states and given the position of Tennessee'southward land legislators in their 48-48 tie. The state's decision came down to 23-twelvemonth-old Representative Harry T. Burn, a Republican from McMinn County, to cast the deciding vote.

Although Fire opposed the amendment, his mother convinced him to corroborate information technology. Mrs. Burn reportedly wrote to her son: "Don't forget to be a proficient boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."

With Burn down's vote, the 19th Amendment was fully ratified.

READ More: How American Women's Suffrage Came Downward to I Human's Vote

When Did Women Become the Right to Vote?

On Baronial 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified by U.South. Secretarial assistant of Country Bainbridge Colby, and women finally achieved the long-sought correct to vote throughout the United States.

On Nov two of that same year, more than 8 million women beyond the U.Southward. voted in elections for the beginning time.

It took over 60 years for the remaining 12 states to ratify the 19th Subpoena. Mississippi was the last to do so, on March 22, 1984.

What Is the 19 Amendment?

The 19th Subpoena granted women the right to vote, and reads:

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the U.s.a. or past whatever state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this commodity by appropriate legislation."

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/19th-amendment-1

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