Women’s suffrage amendment ratified
One hundred years ago today … The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution–which had been passed by Congress June 4, 1919–was ratified when Tennessee became the 36th State to approve the measure, giving it the required three-quarters of the states to vote in favor. (View it at the National Archives site here.)
The Brooklyn Daily Times was one of the few New York dailies that managed to get the news into its final edition.
Brooklyn Newsstand.
It was not until the next morning that the Times could offer its coverage.
Chronicling America.
The amendment ensures women in the US the right to vote. White women, anyway: even after 1920, African American women “encountered the very same disfranchisement strategies and anti-Black violence that led to the disfranchisement of Black men, so that Black women had to continue their fight to secure voting privileges, for both men and women” (Harley). Native American women had to wait until 1924 for basic citizen rights, and Asian American women were not granted the same until 1952.
New York State had granted (white) women the right to vote in 1917, a development which, according to Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello, greatly improved the chances of the Nineteenth Amendment passing (192).
Women’s suffrage "march in October 1917, displaying placards containing the signatures of over one million New York women demanding to vote." The New York Times Photo Archive. Wikicommons.
Sources/further reading:
Goodier, Susan, and Karen Pastorello. Women Will Vote. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2017.
Harley, Sharon. “African American Women and the Nineteenth Amendment.” National Park Service. Accessed 15 August, 2020.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, AUGUST 18, 2020.
TAGS: women, suffrage, voting, law, politics