What Amendment Gave Women the Right to Vote
Nannie Helen Burroughs holds a banner reading, "Banner State Woman's National Baptist Convention" as she stands with other African American women, photographed betwixt 1905 and 1915. Burroughs was an educator and activist who advocated for greater ceremonious rights for African Americans and women. Library of Congress hide explanation
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Library of Congress
Nannie Helen Burroughs holds a imprint reading, "Banner State Woman's National Baptist Convention" equally she stands with other African American women, photographed between 1905 and 1915. Burroughs was an educator and activist who advocated for greater civil rights for African Americans and women.
Library of Congress
On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th subpoena to the U.South. Constitution officially took effect when Secretarial assistant of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation certifying its ratification.
The amendment promised women that their right to vote would "non be denied" on account of sexual activity.
Yet, even after that milestone, millions of people — women and men alike — were still excluded from the vote, equally many barriers to suffrage remained.
The fight over the subpoena was not but nearly sexual practice; information technology was also deeply entwined with race.
Early suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony later split off from their alliance with abolitionists. Library of Congress hide caption
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Early suffragist leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) and Susan B. Anthony afterwards split off from their alliance with abolitionists.
Library of Congress
While the women'south suffrage motion had its roots in the anti-slavery movement, early suffragist leaders including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would later split off from their brotherhood with abolitionists. They were outraged that, under the 15th amendment, Black men would become the vote while white women were still denied.
Decades later, when the 19th amendment was up for debate, Southern politicians especially seethed over the prospect of enfranchising millions of African American women, just every bit the 15th amendment had enfranchised Black men — by police if not past do.
"The debates are explicit!" says Martha S. Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins Academy and writer of the forthcoming book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
"Racism runs through the debates over women's suffrage oftentimes through and through," Jones says. "Racism is a linguistic communication that is shared by suffragists and anti-suffragists akin."
Case in point: In 1919, just earlier the U.S. Senate voted on the 19th amendment, S Carolina Sen. Ellison Smith fulminated against what he called the "alien and unfit [Negro] race."
He proclaimed information technology "a law-breaking against white civilisation" that Black men were granted the vote with the 15th subpoena.
Extending the vote to "the other half of the Negro race," Smith thundered, would unleash new "evils."
In the face of racist opposition, white suffragists betrayed the Black women who had likewise long fought for the right to vote, says Elaine Weiss, author of The Adult female's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote.
"We have to acknowledge," Weiss says, "that [white suffragists] used equally ane of their politically expedient arguments, 'You know, in that location are more white women who will be voting than Black women. So don't worry. White supremacy is not going to exist endangered.'"
In 1918, leading suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt framed the argument this mode in a letter to North Carolina Congressman Edwin Webb, trying to persuade him to vote aye on the 19th amendment:
[The] present status in the South makes sovereigns of some negro men, while all white women are their subjects. These are sad but solemn truths. If y'all want white supremacy, why not take it constitutionally, honorably? The Federal Subpoena offers the way.
Of class, as historian Martha Jones points out, whites in the Jim Crow S knew all besides well how to keep African Americans from voting: Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandpa clauses. Violence and lynching.
"It is a bargain in 1919 and 1920," Jones explains. "Support for women's suffrage in exchange for giving individual states license to proceed to keep Black Americans from the polls. They've long kept Blackness men from the polls, and at present they're going to keep Black women from the polls as well."
Indeed, simply two months later on the 19th amendment was ratified, the prominent African American suffragist and activist Mary Church Terrell wrote a letter to NAACP president Moorfield Storey that was filled with foreboding:
The colored women of the South will exist shamefully treated, and will not be alowed [sic] to vote, I am sure. I promise the Republicans volition do something toward enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. We are so helpless without the right of citizenship in that section of the land where we need it about.
Along with African Americans, other groups who continued to exist excluded from the vote included Asian American immigrants, who were long ineligible for naturalized citizenship on account of race, and simply won the vote starting in 1943.
Among those advocating for both women's suffrage and immigrant rights was a immature woman named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. She was about 5 when her family managed to immigrate to the U.South. from Canton (at present Guangzhou), Communist china, in 1900 through a narrow exemption in the Chinese Exclusion Deed.
Starting as a teenager, Lee became a powerful voice in the suffrage move, says Cathleen Cahill, acquaintance professor of history at Pennsylvania Land University, and author of the forthcoming book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Motion.
"She has a real presence," Cahill says. "People talk virtually her speeches, and almost how the audience is 'Mabelized' by her power. White suffragists think she's phenomenal."
Then much so that they inquire the 16-year-old Lee to march on horseback at the front of a major suffrage parade in New York City in 1912.
It would take more than 20 years later on the 19th amendment'southward ratification for Lee and other Chinese-American immigrants to become eligible for citizenship, and thus win the right to vote.
As well excluded from the franchise: Native Americans, many of whom were not made U.South. citizens until 1924.
Even after that, Native Americans in some states were considered "wards of the land" and weren't guaranteed the right to vote until passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) of the Yankton Sioux Nation was prominent in the women'due south suffrage customs.
Voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) of the Yankton Sioux Nation was prominent in the women'southward suffrage customs. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images hibernate caption
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Voting rights activist Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) of the Yankton Sioux Nation was prominent in the women's suffrage customs.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
"She and other nationally known native suffragists don't necessarily desire to only have U.Due south. citizenship," Cahill says. "They as well want recognition of their citizenship in tribal nations and their treaty rights, specially to land. They desire to use suffrage and U.S. citizenship to save their state and their communities."
Afterwards the 19th amendment is ratified, Cahill says, Bonnin "spends the next several years going to white women and proverb, 'At present you lot have the vote, delight fight for my people.' She says, 'Don't forget your Indian sisters.'"
"It'southward never a done bargain"
"A victory for some was non a victory for all, and fights continue today," says Marcia Chatelain, professor of history and African-American Studies at Georgetown University.
"I call up what this yr provides us an opportunity to do, as people celebrate 100 years of suffrage," she says, "is to ask the disquisitional question: suffrage for whom and at what cost?"
In respond to that question, Chatelain points to the current struggles over voting rights.
"No one should gloat anything every bit long as we live in a state that has such strategically created voter suppression," she says. "We actually tin can't merits that the United States had an incredible victory in 1920, when in 2020 there are still far too many barriers for people to vote."
A portrait of Martha Southward. Jones' great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, who was born enslaved in Kentucky. Martha S. Jones hibernate caption
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Martha S. Jones
A portrait of Martha S. Jones' great-peachy-grandmother, Susan Davis, who was born enslaved in Kentucky.
Martha S. Jones
For historian Martha Jones, the ratification of the 19th amendment "marks for African American women a start, non a finish."
"It fuels a new chapter in the struggle for voting rights in the United States," she says, "a movement that Black women will pb all the way to 1965 and passage of the Voting Rights Human action."
"One of the lessons that we acquire when we compare 1920 and 2020," she continues, "is that voting rights is never a given. It's never a guarantee. It's not a done bargain in the Us."
In her role, Jones can look upwardly at a visual reminder of that long history.
Hanging on the wall is a portrait of her great-great-grandmother, Susan Davis, who was built-in enslaved in Kentucky.
Jones likes to imagine her then-80-twelvemonth-one-time ancestor on ballot day 1920, hitching upwards her horse and buggy, riding into town, "and getting into that line — a segregated line, but a line yet — that would permit her and her daughter Lillian both to cast their first ballots."
"I tin't say for sure that Susan and Lillian voted on that day," Jones says. "I certain hope they did."
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Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/26/904730251/yes-women-could-vote-after-the-19th-amendment-but-not-all-women-or-men
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