19th Amendment

The 19th Amendment is a change to the United States Constitution that gave American women the right to vote. It was added in 1920. The amendment is short. It says that the right to vote cannot be denied "on account of sex." With those few words, about 26 million women became voters almost overnight.

For most of American history, women could not vote in national elections. When the Constitution was written in 1787, voting was left up to each state. Nearly every state allowed only white men who owned property to vote. Women, no matter their age or education, were shut out.

The fight to change this lasted more than 70 years. It began in 1848 at a meeting in Seneca Falls, New York. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott wrote a list of demands that included the right to vote. The fight took so long that Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two of its biggest leaders, both died before women won.

The movement was not always united. Black women like Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells worked hard for the cause. But white leaders sometimes pushed them to the back of marches or ignored their concerns. After 1920, many Black women in the South still could not vote. State laws used poll taxes, unfair tests, and violence to keep them away from the ballot box. That problem was not fixed until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Congress passed the 19th Amendment in June 1919. To become law, three-fourths of the states had to approve it. State after state voted yes through the summer of 1920. By August, the amendment needed just one more state. Tennessee was the deciding vote. The vote in the state legislature was tied. Then a 24-year-old lawmaker named Harry Burn changed his vote to yes after his mother wrote him a letter asking him to "be a good boy." On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment officially became part of the Constitution.

That fall, women voted in a presidential election for the first time in American history. The change was huge, but the work was not over. The amendment opened the door, but many women still had to fight for decades to actually walk through it. Every August 26, the country marks Women's Equality Day, the date the amendment was signed into law.