RSS Feed
News
Doc of the Day: The Nineteenth Amendment
06/04/10
On June 4, 1919, the U.S. Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted American women the right to vote. The women’s suffrage amendment had first been proposed by Susan B. Anthony four decades earlier. Its wording remained unchanged as it was reintroduced in every new session of Congress until it finally passed: “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 Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by the last of the required thirty-six states—Tennessee—on August 18, 1920. After a preliminary vote of the Tennessee legislature ended in a tie, twenty-four-year-old Senator Harry Burn broke the stalemate by switching sides and voting in favor of the amendment. “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow,” he explained, “and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
Read the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION