Today, May 21, marks the day in 1919 when the US House of Representatives voted in favor of the Susan B. Anthony 19th amendment to the Constitution, by a margin of 304 to 89. Two weeks later, the Senate cleared the amendment 56 to 25, with four votes to spare.

19th Amendment

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.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

It took nearly 15 months for the required number (3/4) of states to ratify the amendment.  The Western States led the way.

In California, Clara Shortridge Foltz, San Diego’s first female attorney, wrote the California Voter’s Rights Amendment that appeared on the ballot on October 10, 1911. The final statewide vote was close with a margin of less than 1.5%.  But the votes were high enough and California became the 6th state in the country to give women the right to vote, all of which were Western states.

Ultimately, women in California won the vote nine years before the 19th Amendment was ratified–on October 10, 1911, California joined five other western states where women could vote equally with men.

This image, published in 1915, “The Awakening” depicts a woman, the personification of Liberty, carrying a torch for suffrage as she walks across the United States. Emblazoned on her billowing cloak, the phrase “Votes for Women” was one of the suffrage movement’s principal slogans. Before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women in most western states had won the right to vote, but many eastern states had not yet enfranchised women.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It took eight decades and three generations of women to convince Congress to pass the 19th Amendment and to implement the law in August 1920.  It would take another 45 years and the passage of the Voting Rights Act before black women became truly enfranchised.