The 19th Amendment, Explained

What is the 19th Amendment?

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, “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.” The amendment granting women the right to vote was enacted at the start of the Roaring Twenties, decades after a prolonged and meandering fight for enfranchisement. 

When did women get the right to vote?

The 19th Amendment codified women’s suffrage nationwide, but long before its ratification, unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The complicated story of women’s suffrage is a winding road, from the early conventions that catapulted the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony into national acclaim to the ultimate adoption of the amendment that resulted in the single largest expansion of voting rights in American history. There is no clear starting point, though many identify the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 as the dawn of the movement.

As far back as the late 1830s, the push for women’s suffrage was deeply intertwined with the movement to abolish slavery. Many women who became skilled at organizing and advocacy through the abolitionist cause — including Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké — found their way into the suffrage movement. It would still take many decades after the earliest stirrings of the women’s rights movement for women to achieve full and equal voting rights. And for many women of color, the realization of that right would take even longer. Although the ratification of the 19th Amendment allowed Black women in the North and West to vote and hold office for the first time, in the South, millions of women of color remained excluded from the process due to the racially discriminatory tactics of the Jim Crow era. 

When was the 19th Amendment adopted?

More than 160 years after women cast their first votes on American soil, Congress approved the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. It didn’t become part of the Constitution, however, until it was ratified by the 36th state legislature — Tennessee — on August 18, 1920.

Did the 19th Amendment grant all women the right to vote?

When the 19th Amendment became the law of the land after hard-fought campaigning, white women immediately benefited from its ratification. But for millions of women of color across a significant portion of the country, gaining the right to vote would take several more decades.

The 19th Amendment did not eradicate the systemic racism that pervaded the South, where most Black women lived, and other regions. Fifty years earlier, the 15th Amendment, which barred states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” was ratified. Despite this guarantee, with the blessing of the courts, states across the South enacted racially discriminatory policies — such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and felony disenfranchisement laws. These restrictions kept many Black women, Black men, and other voters of color out of the democratic process until the rise of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.

In many parts of the country, Native American, Asian American, and Latina women were also largely excluded from the ballot box at the time the 19th Amendment was passed until each group gained access to voting in the succeeding decades.

Native Americans, who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship in 1920, experienced none of the benefits of the ratification of the 15th and 19th Amendments. It wasn’t until the passage of the Snyder Act of 1924, which granted citizenship to U.S.-born Native Americans, that Native American men and women achieved some access to the ballot. Still, like Black Americans, they were disenfranchised for decades afterward by racially discriminatory tactics, including claims that living on a reservation meant that a person was not a resident of the state.

Asian women, too, were excluded from the ballot box by racist laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented Asian immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens. It wasn’t until three decades after the 19th Amendment was ratified that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 granted Asian immigrants the right to naturalize and gain full citizenship, enabling them to participate in elections.

For Latina women, “white primaries” in the South as well as deliberately discriminatory English literacy tests across the Sunbelt effectively kept them from full access to the polls even after the 19th Amendment passed.

It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the promise of the 19th Amendment became a reality for most women of color. This pivotal civil rights legislation banned racial discrimination in voting, opening the door for equal access to the democratic process.

There were still hurdles to be overcome, however. For women who were primarily non-English speakers, particularly in the Latino and Asian American communities, exercising the right to vote remained burdensome until the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act. That year, Section 203 was added to the law to require that all voting and election materials be provided “in the language of the applicable minority group as well as in the English language.”

Even today, new restrictions and hurdles imposed on voting disproportionately impact communities of color, curbing their full political participation. 

The road to suffrage was more of a patchwork of fits and starts. It took more than a century for the consensus in support of women’s suffrage to reach the threshold required for an amendment.

The earliest recorded vote legally cast by a woman in America occurred in 1756 in colonial Massachusetts. Though only free men who owned property had voting rights, the town permitted Lydia Chapin Taft, a wealthy widow whose eldest surviving son was younger than voting age, to vote in three Uxbridge town meetings — the first one in favor of appropriating funding for the French and Indian War, and the other two in 1758 and 1765.

1776–1807: The New Jersey experiment

During the country’s nascent years, only five of the original state constitutions explicitly noted that the right to vote belonged exclusively to men. But according to records, in no other state besides New Jersey did women exercise that right.

On July 2, 1776, the same day the Continental Congress unanimously voted for independence from Great Britain, New Jersey adopted its state constitution, with a nondescript “they” buried in the voter qualifications statute. “That all Inhabitants of this Colony of full Age, who are worth Fifty Pounds proclamation Money clear Estate in the same, & have resided within the County in which they claim a Vote for twelve Months immediately preceding the Election, shall be entitled to vote,” the state constitution read.

In 1790 and 1797, the New Jersey Legislature clarified what the state constitution only implied, revising the state’s election statute to include the words “he or she.” That change, which applied only to single women with property, was first adopted in 7 of 13 counties, and then later across the state. Married women had no separate legal existence from their husbands and therefore could not vote. Though it’s difficult to get a complete picture of how many women exercised this right, poll records show that between 1800 and 1806, at least 75 women voted in state and congressional elections in Upper Penns Neck Township.

In 1807, the New Jersey Legislature reversed its progressive stance on voting rights, spurred by growing fears over the political influence of women and Black voters. “After it was reported that women cast nearly a quarter of all votes in the election of 1802, a Trenton newspaper worried that female turnout had reached ‘alarming heights,’” the Brennan Center’s John Kowal and Wilfred Codrington write in The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union. “The brief experiment with New Jersey’s ‘petticoat electors’ came to an end in 1807.”

That year, more ballots were cast than there were eligible voters in a disputed county election, leading to rampant allegations of voter fraud and new voting restrictions. Responding to public outcry, the New Jersey legislature passed the 1807 Electoral Reform Law, imposing uniform voting rules that abolished the property requirement and limited the franchise to white male taxpayers. In doing so, they baselessly laid the blame for voter fraud squarely onto women, people of color, and immigrants, disenfranchising them once more. By 1844, that change was enshrined by a state constitutional convention, which rewrote the charter to explicitly restrict voting to free white male citizens.

1848: A start in Seneca Falls

While there is debate over whether the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 was truly the start of the women’s suffrage movement, it did mark a significant turning point. The 300-person gathering in upstate New York, attended by renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass, sought to address women’s inequality and included a radical demand: suffrage. At the convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton introduced the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, demanding for women “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States,” including the right to vote. The declaration, which became a framework for the suffrage movement, was signed by 68 women and 32 men. The Seneca Falls Convention spawned many other conventions for women’s rights in the years that followed.

In October 1850, the suffrage movement held a two-day national women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts — the first of a series of annual national convenings. The gathering, which drew almost a thousand attendees who lined the street around Brinley Hall, sought to strengthen the burgeoning movement’s support around the country. An array of notable speakers endorsed the right to vote for women, including Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, and Lucretia Mott, among others. Truth, an emancipated slave known for her powerful oratory, spoke specifically to the plight of enslaved women. The convention’s delegates affirmed a resolution pledging solidarity with those enslaved, which stated, “We will bear in our heart of hearts the memory of the trampled womanhood of the plantation, and omit no effort to raise it to a share in the rights we claim for ourselves.” The convention received negative press coverage in the days that followed.

The next convention was held in 1851 in Akron, Ohio. Truth took the stage once more, delivering her acclaimed speech, known as “Ain’t I a Woman.” The speech, ahead of its time, highlighted the intersection of the suffrage and abolitionist movements, weaving together the sexism and racial discrimination suffered by Black women. Two different versions of the speech emerged, leaving open the question of what exactly Truth said. The version that actually includes the iconic question, “Ain’t I a woman?,” was published by suffragist and writer Frances Gage in the New York Independent more than a decade after Truth delivered the speech. The Sojourner Truth Project casts doubt on the fidelity of that version because of the liberties Gage took and the Southern dialect she assigned to Truth, a native New Yorker. The more faithful transcription, according to the project, was published a month after the convention by journalist Marius Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle.

A year after the end of the Civil War, leading suffrage activists, including Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as abolitionists Douglass and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, met in New York City for the 11th National Women’s Rights Convention. The convention unanimously approved a resolution to form the American Equal Rights Association with the goal of working to “secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex.” The new organization unified the fights for women’s voting rights and civil rights for newly freed Black Americans.

Over the next two decades, the movement found some early success in the West, but it also suffered numerous losses on the ballot and in legislatures. In 1867, a campaign in Kansas to ratify an amendment that would grant equal voting rights for women and Black Americans failed. With it, the strength of a united suffrage movement under the American Equal Rights Association began to falter.

1869: A divided movement

The earliest efforts to secure voting rights for women were deeply intertwined with the fight to end slavery. But in the post–Civil War era, known as Reconstruction, the movement fractured along racial lines. After the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 15th Amendment brought those fissures to the fore.

Many suffragists supported a constitutional amendment enfranchising Black men, even if that achievement came before extending voting rights to women. Others in the movement, who long supported suffrage for both women and Black men, rejected the idea that women should step aside. The latter group opposed any change to the Constitution that did not also grant women the right to vote. As Congress debated the 15th Amendment, that divide became particularly fraught, with some white suffragists used racist and anti-immigrant stereotypes to make their case.

For example, a few months after the 15th Amendment passed Congress on February 26, 1869, Stanton, who along with Susan B. Anthony collected signatures in support of the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery, expressed frustration at the exclusion of women’s suffrage in the voting rights amendment. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung,” she said at a women’s rights convention, invoking ethnically coded language for Black men, as well as Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants, “who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for . . . [noted suffragist] Lucretia Mott.”

After that bitter meeting in May 1869, the American Equal Rights Association was effectively finished and the movement splintered into two factions with competing approaches to suffrage. Stanton and Anthony, representing women who opposed the 15th Amendment’s focus on placing Black men’s suffrage above universal suffrage, formed the National Woman Suffrage Association with the goal of achieving women’s suffrage through a separate federal constitutional amendment. This new group, seen as more radical than its counterpart, pursued a wide-ranging feminist agenda that included not only women’s suffrage but also women’s social equality. Meanwhile, Stone, Harper, and others who backed the enfranchisement of Black men before women created the American Woman Suffrage Association, an explicitly multiracial organization that adopted a state-by-state approach to fulfilling their sole mission: securing suffrage for women.

1872–1913: A new departure and forces rejoined

While the three Reconstruction Amendments did not explicitly enfranchise women, some suffragists advanced a novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment that argued that it implicitly granted them voting rights. Pointing to the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” these suffragists, including Anthony, argued that the right to vote in federal elections was already conferred to women as citizens under the 14th Amendment.

Members of this “New Departure” movement tested their theory at the polls in 1872. Anthony and her three sisters sought to register to vote in their hometown of Rochester, New York. Though it took an hour of vigorous debate and threats of prosecution to persuade the reluctant election inspectors to agree to their request, Anthony and her sisters were among more than a dozen Rochester women who successfully registered to vote on November 1, 1872. City newspapers harshly criticized their actions along with their interpretation of the 14th Amendment, writing, “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon.”

Over these protests, Anthony and other Rochester women cast their ballots on Election Day — a small victory that led to significant blowback. Anthony was arrested two weeks later and charged with election fraud. She was found guilty and sentenced to pay a $100 fine, which she refused to do. Afterward, she called her trial, in which the judge directed the jury to deliver the guilty verdict, “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”

One woman who subscribed to the New Departure theory tested it in the courts. Suffragist Virginia Minor was blocked from voting in the 1872 election by a local registrar in St. Louis, Missouri. In a case that made its way to the Supreme Court, Minor’s husband filed a lawsuit on her behalf, citing the 14th Amendment. In an 1875 ruling, the Court unanimously rejected Minor’s claim, concluding that the right to vote was not guaranteed by citizenship and that states had the power to restrict the franchise to men.

Following that setback, suffrage activists set their sights on Congress. The 19th Amendment was first introduced in Congress by Sen. Aaron Sargent of California on January 10, 1878. It would take more than 41 years for the amendment to secure the necessary two-thirds vote in each house of Congress, but the introduction of the joint resolution, widely known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was a consequential milestone. For the first time, suffragists were allowed to testify before the members of the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections on the issue, and they flooded the committee with tens of thousands of petitions supporting the amendment. By June, however, the committee recommended that consideration of the amendment be indefinitely postponed, effectively shelving it.

Meanwhile, the piecemeal campaign waged by the American Woman Suffrage Association, Stone’s outfit within the suffrage movement, saw mixed success. Bids to give women the right to vote in the territories of Washington, Nebraska, and Dakota all failed throughout the 1850s and 1860s. But in 1869, Wyoming Territory lawmakers enacted the first women’s suffrage law in the United States, extending the right to vote to women without any restrictions based on property ownership or marital status. The law also allowed women to hold public office, and in 1870, Esther Morris became the first woman in the nation to do so when she was appointed justice of the peace in South Pass City. Twenty years later, women’s voting rights were enshrined in Wyoming’s draft state constitution despite fears that the addition would stand in the way of its push for statehood. Though there was some resistance, in 1890, Congress ultimately agreed to admit Wyoming as the 44th state, making it the first in the union to guarantee universal suffrage.

In Kansas, where a statewide constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote was defeated in 1867, the suffrage movement shifted its focus to municipal elections, seeking to seat women in local offices. By 1887, an all-female city council was elected in Syracuse and Argonia elected the first woman mayor in the country. Throughout the 1890s, three states in the West — Colorado, Idaho, and Utah — all approved giving women the right to vote.

Amid this limited series of victories in sparsely populated states and territories in the West, and with a constitutional amendment stalled in Congress, the divided suffrage movement rejoined forces. The two competing organizations — the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association — merged in 1890, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The new group, led by Stanton and Anthony in its earliest years, sought to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution while also orchestrating state campaigns across the country. By the early 1900s, Anthony handed over the reins to the next generation, hand-picking Carrie Chapman Catt to succeed her as president.

Still, racial fractures continued to bedevil the suffrage movement. Within the National American Woman Suffrage Association, some chapters welcomed Black women and others did not. Notably, state and local chapters barred Black women from attending national conventions held in Atlanta in 1895 and in New Orleans in 1903. On the eve of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, DC, in which some 5,000 women marched along Pennsylvania Avenue to demand their right to vote, national organizers instructed Black women to march in the back. Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist and activist, openly defied this demand, joining her Illinois state contingent instead.

1916: A younger generation for suffrage

After the 1913 procession, new tension grew inside the movement. A younger generation, frustrated by what they saw as the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s mild-mannered tactics, pursued more militant strategies. In 1912, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, two young suffragists appointed to the organization’s congressional committee, tried to persuade their counterparts to focus solely on a federal amendment instead of a state-based strategy. Paul and Burns formed the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913 while keeping ties with the National Association.

On the state advocacy front, by 1914, nearly every state and territory in the West adopted women’s suffrage, including California (1911); Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon (1912); and Montana and Nevada (1914). But the rest of the country lagged, as more populous states in the East, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, delivered crushing defeats. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Catt, pursued suffrage through a dual-track strategy known as “The Winning Plan,” which comprised state-by-state organizing and lobbying in the nation’s capital. Catt’s multipronged strategy steadied a fractious movement, directing its focus to sophisticated organizing and lobbying efforts. Her leadership was instrumental in shaping the campaign for suffrage leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment and, ultimately, its ratification.

But for Paul and her allies, that route was taking too long.

In 1916, Paul decided to cut ties with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the Congressional Union evolved into the National Woman’s Party, realizing Paul’s vision for an organization dedicated solely to fighting for a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. The group was known for pushing its cause through militant protests, hunger strikes, and campaigns against politicians who didn’t support suffrage.

Members of the National Woman’s Party rose to national prominence following President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection. Between 1917 and 1919, Paul employed a new and more sensational strategy: peaceful demonstrations outside the White House gates. The women who gathered protested in silence, and later with signs that highlighted the White House’s hypocrisy for supporting democracy abroad in World War I while excluding women from the process at home. They became known as the Silent Sentinels.

After months of daily picketing, Paul, Burns, and dozens of other Sentinels were arrested in October 1917 and sent to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where they continued protesting through hunger strikes. Reports of forced feedings and abuse — including accounts of one November evening, dubbed the Night of Terror, when the women were brutally beaten and terrorized by the guards — drew the attention and sympathy of the public. The suffragists were released later that month. By January 1918, in part due to Catt’s political savvy and Paul’s public pressure, Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment during his State of the Union address.

1918–1920: Suffrage at last — for some

With Wilson’s support and 15 states granting equal voting rights to women, the women’s suffrage amendment was reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, where it passed by a two-thirds majority in January 1918. In September of that year, Wilson appeared in the Senate chamber to make a direct appeal for women’s suffrage — a rare move for a president. But the proposal fell two votes short of passage, prompting the National Woman’s Party to launch targeted campaigns against the senators who voted against the amendment. Five weeks later, Democrats lost their majorities in both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, in part due to their failure to pass the 19th Amendment.

It took several more attempts for both chambers to finally pass the amendment. In the Senate, Southern Democrats represented the most significant hurdle. In May 1919, Wilson called a special session of Congress, which finally secured the necessary two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate after opponents of the amendment abandoned a filibuster. The House approved the 19th Amendment on May 21, 1919, more than 40 years after it was first introduced. The Senate followed a couple of weeks later on June 4.

The 19th Amendment’s fate was then left to the states. At least 36 states, three-fourths of state legislatures at the time, had to approve the amendment for it to be officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution. Within days of the vote in Congress, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan ratified the measure. By the end of the year, 19 more states, including Texas, followed suit, and 2 states rejected it. (Alabama and Georgia, much like the rest of the South, staunchly opposed giving women equal voting rights.) By March 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but that year, it was rejected by another 6: South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Delaware, and Louisiana.

After that series of demoralizing losses, the amendment appeared to be seriously in doubt. The 36th ratifying state remained elusive until the ratification process landed in Tennessee. While it wasn’t clear how the legislature would vote, the year before, Tennessee lawmakers had granted partial suffrage to women, allowing them to vote in presidential and municipal elections.

Tennessee Gov. Albert H. Roberts, under pressure from President Wilson, called a special session of the legislature on August 9, 1920. For weeks, activists, organizers, and lobbyists flocked to Nashville, the state capital, all trying to sway lawmakers’ votes one way or the other. Pro-suffrage activists donned yellow roses, while the opposition wore red.

The final vote came on August 18, 1920. The House was deadlocked. Then, State Rep. Harry Burn, a 24-year-old Republican from McMinn County who had initially voted to table — and effectively kill — the suffrage amendment, had a dramatic change of heart. Though he wore the red rose of the “antis” on his lapel, in his pocket he had a letter from his mother, Febb Burn, urging him to “be a good boy” and support ratification. Burn heeded her words and cast the decisive “aye” vote to approve the amendment, and with it, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. After being accused of taking bribes to switch his vote, Burns explained his decision by saying, “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”

Post-1920: Struggles after the 19th Amendment was ratified

The road to the 19th Amendment was long and arduous. As Catt said, “To get the word ‘male’ out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign.” But for millions of women of color, once the amendment was adopted into the Constitution, the fight for equal voting rights was far from over.

Even with a constitutional right to vote, women of color were not protected against the voter suppression tactics that took hold in the South. Without federal legislation to give more teeth to the 19th Amendment, Southern women of color encountered the same racially discriminatory laws that deterred or blocked Black men from the ballot box. Some states imposed grandfather clauses — a restriction that limited voting rights to those whose grandfathers were able to vote — while others required literacy tests or poll taxes to register to vote. While seemingly neutral, these measures disproportionately disenfranchised voters of color. Additionally, deeply ingrained anti-immigrant fervor, which often translated into racist and xenophobic legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, kept still more people of color out of the democratic process.

It wasn’t until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights law aimed at blunting voter suppression, that communities of color were given a more equal opportunity to exercise the franchise. But that progress has been stunted in recent years. Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, eroding key protections against racial discrimination in voting.

Susan B. Anthony was a pioneer of the women’s suffrage movement, first traveling the country with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to build support for the cause, then forming and serving as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and ultimately becoming one of the primary forces within the organization. Born into a Quaker family in 1820, Anthony long believed in social equality. In the mid-1840s, Anthony embraced the abolition movement, where she formed friendships with other reformers, including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Stanton.

During the Reconstruction era, Anthony and Stanton collected hundreds of thousands of signatures for a petition supporting the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Anthony shifted her focus to women’s suffrage in the post–Civil War era. In 1872, after casting a ballot in the presidential election in New York, she was arrested along with 14 other women. She was the only one of them to be tried, convicted, and fined for voting illegally. After her arrest, Anthony delivered the speech “Is it a Crime to Vote?,” in which she made an impassioned plea for women’s suffrage. Anthony devoted 50 years of her life to the movement. She died 14 years before the 19th Amendment, popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was ratified.

Lucy Burns, a firebrand alongside her friend Alice Paul, was one of the driving forces within the movement during the early 20th century. Like Paul, Burns pushed for more militant tactics to achieve suffrage, and the two formed the National Woman’s Party after leaving the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was one of the organizers behind the daily White House protests demanding suffrage. Burns was arrested six times and spent several months behind bars, including a stint in Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse, where she and other women were assaulted during what became known as the Night of Terror in November 1917. That night, Burns was left handcuffed with her arms above her head. The ensuing media reports of this cruel punishment helped sway public opinion in favor of the suffragists’ cause. After the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Burns retired from public life until her death in 1966.

Carrie Chapman Catt was part of a second generation of suffragists who continued the crusade after Stanton and Anthony stepped down. Her involvement in the movement began in the late 1880s in Iowa before her impassioned oratory and shrewd ability to mobilize local suffragists across the country propelled her to national fame. In 1900, she succeeded Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. During her tenure, she focused on coordinating state-by-state campaigns alongside a push for a federal amendment. Catt was the architect of “The Winning Plan,” which brought together different parts of the suffrage movement at a pivotal inflection point. Her strategy had all the trappings of a modern advocacy campaign, “emphasizing top-down organization, a sophisticated approach to lobbying, and a communications operation aimed at swaying public opinion,” write Kowal and Codrington in The People’s Constitution.

She clashed with younger suffragists, such as Paul and Burns, over the best strategies for advancing the cause, and she opposed their more radical tactics, including their months of regular protests outside the White House during World War I. Catt’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering was crucial to gaining President Woodrow Wilson’s support and finally passing the 19th Amendment through Congress. After the suffrage amendment passed, Catt founded the League of Women Voters to engage women on political matters. She served as honorary president of the organization until her death in 1947.

Frederick Douglass, considered the father of the civil rights movement, also played a key role in the women’s suffrage movement. Known for his deftness as an orator, journalist, and social activist in support of the abolitionist cause, Douglass’s contributions to the women’s rights movement began as early as the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. At that gathering, he advocated for and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, the initial manifesto of the movement proposed by Stanton, delivering an impassioned speech in favor of the suffrage plank. Douglass believed that “right is of no sex, truth is of no color” — the motto of his North Star newspaper. He continued to be an active fighter in the suffrage movement throughout the 19th century, calling himself a “women’s rights man.”

In 1866, Douglass, Stanton, Anthony, and other suffragists founded the short-lived American Equal Rights Association to bring universal suffrage to the fore. He later split with Stanton and Anthony during the push for the 15th Amendment, believing that Black men should be granted the right to vote, even if that meant they were enfranchised before women. He died in 1895, a little over two decades before the 19th Amendment was enshrined in the Constitution.

Wilhelmina Kekelaokalaninui Widemann Dowsett, a Native Hawaiian, was a formidable figure in the suffrage movement at the turn of the century. In 1912, Dowsett helped organize the National Women’s Equal Suffrage Association of Hawaii, the first women’s suffrage club in the U.S. territory. Modeled after the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the group mobilized local advocates and supporters to petition for voting rights. Dowsett invited well-known suffragists, including Catt, to speak to the club’s members. In part due to the efforts of Native Hawaiian suffragists, President Wilson signed a bill allowing Hawaii to decide the issue of suffrage on its own. Dowsett organized Native Hawaiian and white suffragists at the territory’s capitol building to urge legislators to give women the right to vote. In 1919, a measure approving women’s suffrage passed the Hawaii Senate, but it stalled in the house chamber. Dowsett died in 1929, nearly a decade after the ratification of the 19th Amendment and long before Hawaiians were granted full enjoyment of the right to vote upon becoming the 50th state in the union in 1959.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet, lecturer, and activist, was an important voice in the civil rights and suffrage movements, highlighting the intersection of race and voting rights. In 1866, after distinguishing herself on the lecture circuit in the years prior, she delivered a speech, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York. Her words urged suffragists to extend the campaign for equal rights to Black women and recognize the dual burdens of racism and sexism that they face. The convention went on to organize the American Equal Rights Association to band together the fight for suffrage for white and Black women. The group later splintered over the ratification of the 15th Amendment, and Harper, joined by Douglass and others, became one of the founding members of the American Woman Suffrage Association.

At the organization’s 1873 convention in New York, Harper called for equal rights for Black women, asserting in her closing speech, “As much as white women need the ballot, colored women need it more.” In 1896, she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women and served as vice president. Nine years before the 19th Amendment became the law of the land, Harper died at the age of 85.

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant and women’s rights activist, earned fame at 16 years old when she helped lead a massive New York City suffrage parade on horseback. Eight years later, the 19th Amendment’s adoption enfranchised women across the country, but many women of color, including Lee, were excluded from voting due to racially discriminatory laws. Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act and, as a result, were ineligible to vote. Though denied the right to vote herself, Lee committed her life to advocating for equal rights for women, mobilizing the Chinese community and helping many other women gain access to the franchise. It took more than two decades after the 19th Amendment’s ratification, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, for Lee to become eligible for citizenship and the right to vote. But it’s unknown if she ever attained U.S. citizenship and exercised that right. She died one year after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed.

Alice Paul is a pivotal figure in the women’s rights movement in the run-up to the 19th Amendment. When personal conflicts and disparate visions for the movement surfaced following the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, Paul left the National American Woman Suffrage Association to form the National Woman’s Party alongside Lucy Burns. Paul is best known for organizing the Silent Sentinels, thousands of nonviolent protesters who picketed outside the White House gates for 18 months between 1917 and 1919 to advocate for women’s suffrage despite intense scrutiny and pushback. Paul was arrested during the protests in 1917 and sentenced to seven months in prison, where she started a hunger strike. The harsh treatment of Paul and others inside the prison garnered significant national sympathy. Due in part to the public pressure that Paul’s campaign generated, President Wilson publicly announced his support for the constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage in his 1918 State of the Union address. After the 19th Amendment’s ratification, Paul turned her focus to drafting and advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment to enshrine legal protections against sex-based discrimination. The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923. Paul died in 1977.

Jeannette Rankin, a Montana homesteader turned suffragist, was the first woman elected to Congress. She became involved with the suffrage movement while she attended the University of Washington. Later, she helped organize the New York Woman Suffrage Party and became a lobbyist with the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1914, her home state of Montana granted women the right to vote, outpacing progress in much of the country. Four years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, Rankin became the first woman in the country’s history to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. She served only one term, as her vote against U.S. involvement in World War I led to her losing reelection. In 1940, she returned to the U.S. House and served alongside six other women members. She adhered to her long-held pacifist beliefs and was the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack. On the House floor, she said, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” The controversial vote effectively ended her political career. She died in 1973.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton got involved in the push for voting rights for women after she and Lucretia Mott were excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. The two women later organized the historic women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, where Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments for attendees to sign, a radical document that demanded important changes to empower women in both society and in the law. By 1851, Stanton met Anthony, and the pair collaborated on speeches as they traveled the country together advocating for suffrage. By the Civil War, Stanton was seen as one of the foremost women’s rights advocates. Along with many other suffragists, however, she prioritized advocating for the 13th Amendment to end slavery during that period, putting aside women’s rights.

It wasn’t until debate arose over the 15th Amendment, which extended voting rights to newly freed Black men, that a rift splintered the suffrage movement. Stanton, along with other suffragists, believed that the amendment should include voting rights for women, not only Black men. The movement remained fractured until it reunited in 1890 under the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Stanton died nearly two decades before women finally won the right to vote nationwide.

Lucy Stone rose to prominence in the women’s rights movement at the same time as Stanton and Anthony. Stone’s fight for equality, both as an abolitionist and suffragist, extended to her marriage: She wrote marriage vows reflecting her egalitarian ideals and set a precedent by keeping her maiden name. Stone was the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree, graduating from Oberlin College in 1847. She also organized the first National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850, two years after the Seneca Falls Convention. By the late 1860s, cracks within the women’s rights movement emerged over the passage of the 15th Amendment. Stone supported extending voting rights to Black men before women, breaking with Stanton and Anthony. She went on to form the American Woman Suffrage Association alongside Julia Ward Howe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and others. While Stone saw the two suffrage associations reunite by 1890, she died less than three years later.

Mary Church Terrell was one of the leading reformers at the intersection of civil rights and women’s rights. After graduating from Oberlin College, Terrell dedicated much of her life to confronting racial discrimination as one of the founding members of the National Association of Colored Women, which she served as president in its early years, and later as one of the founders and charter members of the NAACP. She championed the rights of Black women in hopes of elevating all Black Americans, and she joined the protests outside the White House in 1917 to advocate for women’s suffrage. After the 19th Amendment was adopted, Terrell turned her focus more broadly to the civil rights movement until her death in 1954.

Sojourner Truth — known for delivering her famous speech, remembered as “Ain’t I a Woman,” at the 1851 Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention — is one of the most influential 19th-century figures in the women’s and civil rights movements. Born into slavery as Isabella Bomfree in New York, she secured her freedom by her late twenties. She renamed herself Sojourner Truth after converting to Christianity in her forties. Truth, an abolitionist and preacher, spent her life traveling around the country, making passionate and influential speeches condemning the evils of slavery and fighting for racial and gender equality. Since she never learned to read or write in her lifetime, she dictated her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, to fellow abolitionist Olive Gilbert.

In 1864, Truth was invited to meet with President Abraham Lincoln at the White House, making her one of the few Black women to have had such access at the time. She was also the first Black woman to win a lawsuit in the United States, challenging the sale of her five-year-old son by a New York slaveowner to an Alabama slaveholder in the Ulster County Courthouse. She argued that the sale violated New York’s emancipation law and succeeded in recovering her son in 1828. She died nearly 40 years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

Ida B. Wells, a prominent journalist who wrote for several Black newspapers, is a civil rights icon who served as an intrepid leader of the women’s suffrage movement, promoting the rights of Black women even when it wasn’t popular among white suffragists. She cofounded the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the NAACP in 1909. Within the suffrage movement, she is most famous for defying demands to keep the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, DC, segregated. Instead of marching in the back of the parade as she was directed to, she joined her fellow suffragists from the Illinois delegation, who were white, in their march along Pennsylvania Avenue. That same year, she also founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, the first organizing club for Black suffragists in Illinois. Wells died in 1931, about a decade after the 19th Amendment was ratified. 

After securing the right to vote, women’s rights activists shifted their focus to other critical battles. Some suffragists, including Alice Paul, immediately began pushing for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would enshrine broad protections against sex-based discrimination in the Constitution. While the amendment was approved by Congress in 1972, it failed to gain the support of the 38 state legislatures needed to ratify the measure before a 1982 deadline.

Other advocates pursued a more incremental approach, lobbying for specific laws to protect and expand women’s rights in various areas of life, including access to education, equal pay, housing, and financial independence — changes that helped usher women into a new, more egalitarian age.

• Equal Pay Act of 1963: Prohibits sex-based discrimination in the payment of wages for equal work. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is charged with enforcing the Equal Pay Act, among other laws prohibiting sex-based discrimination in the workplace. As recently as 2023, the investment bank Goldman Sachs agreed to pay a historic $215 million to settle a decade-long lawsuit under the Equal Pay Act alleging systematic sex-based discrimination in pay and promotions against nearly 3,000 female employees.
• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Prohibits employment discrimination against employees and job applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. These protections apply to various aspects of employment, including hiring, firing, compensation, and promotions. Title VII established the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces federal laws against workplace discrimination. One of the early landmark cases under Title VII successfully challenged an airline policy of firing flight attendants once they married, as the court ruled it was a form of unlawful sex-based discrimination. Cases like these helped pave the way for greater participation by women in the labor force.
• Fair Housing Act of 1968: Prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, and disability in the sale, rental, or financing of housing. The Fair Housing Act only became law after several defeats in Congress. It wasn’t until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, which spurred renewed urgency to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that the measure was enacted as part of the expanded Civil Rights Act of 1968. Later that year, the Supreme Court ruled that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery gave Congress the power to prohibit private racial discrimination in housing. The decision paved the way for the enforcement of federal protections against housing discrimination, such as the Fair Housing Act.
• Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972: Prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs or activities at any public or private institution that receives federal financial assistance, including colleges and universities. The law, perhaps best known for regulating college sports, requires athletic programs to provide equal participation, scholarships, and other benefits for men and women. It also protects students from sexual violence or misconduct and guides how institutions respond to these incidents and allegations. One of the most prominent lawsuits brought under Title IX fought against Brown University’s decision to strip university funding from its varsity women’s gymnastics and volleyball teams. The women’s programs were reinstated, and the 1995 decision laid the foundation for how universities create and maintain equal opportunities to participate in intercollegiate athletics.
• Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974: Prohibits creditors from discriminating against applicants for loans, credit cards, or other forms of credit on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, and receiving public assistance, among other protected characteristics. After pressure from women’s rights activists, Congress passed the law to provide women with greater financial independence. However, some groups did not believe the legislation went far enough to combat credit discrimination when it passed, criticizing the insufficient enforcement mechanisms.
• Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978: Prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy or childbirth in workplace decisions related to hiring, firing, layoffs, pay, assignments, promotions, training, and other benefits. A 2013 decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals extended the protections of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to cover breastfeeding.
• Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act of 2010: Prohibits health programs that receive federal financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. Among the nondiscrimination protections for these groups, Section 1557 requires covered providers to take reasonable steps to provide access to language assistance for individuals with limited English proficiency and accommodate people with disabilities. Nevertheless, the law’s implementation has varied widely across presidential administrations, and there is ongoing debate and litigation over its scope, including whether it provides nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, pregnancy, and sexual orientation.

Despite the promise of women’s suffrage in 1920, many states continued to curtail minority voters’ ability to exercise that right. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that participation increased among women of color and voters of color more broadly. The legislation, which barred racially discriminatory voter suppression, marked a significant step toward achieving more equal voter participation. In the 1970s, further improvements to the law required voting materials to be provided in languages other than English.

This expansion of democracy, however, continued to encounter resistance. In 2013, the Supreme Court dismantled key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a new wave of restrictive voting laws in the states. The result severely weakened federal protection of voting rights, with damaging effects for historically disenfranchised groups. Securing full and equal voting rights for communities of color is still a work in progress.

• Voting Rights Act of 1965: One of the most successful civil rights laws in our nation’s history, prohibiting race discrimination in voting. The Voting Rights Act’s impact was felt immediately: By the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new Black voters were registered. Among its most important provisions was Section 5, the requirement for jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain approval or “preclearance” from the federal government to make any changes to their voting practices or procedures. The legislation was reauthorized and strengthened in 1970, 1975, and 1982. It was readopted for another 25 years in 2006. The 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder weakened the Voting Rights Act by effectively eliminating the Section 5 preclearance requirement.
• Freedom to Vote Act: Federal legislation that would set national standards to expand and protect access to the ballot, prevent partisan interference in election administration, prohibit extreme partisan gerrymandering, and strengthen campaign finance safeguards. The Freedom to Vote Act nearly passed Congress in 2022, failing to overcome a filibuster by only two votes.
• John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act: Federal legislation, named after the civil rights icon, that would modernize and strengthen the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial discrimination in voting. The bill would reestablish a coverage formula for “preclearance,” after the Supreme Court struck down the previous formula in its 2013 Shelby County decision. The bill — like its companion legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act — was introduced in Congress in 2021 and fell just short of the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster in the Senate in early 2022.