On November 2, 1920, American women did act—they voted.
In cities and towns, women headed to their local polling stations. They smiled and chatted together as they waited in line. Housewives voted on their way to the grocery store. Office and factory workers went over their lunch breaks. Rural women made their way to the polls through fierce snowstorms. Mothers brought their babies, carrying them in their arms.
Carrie Catt cast her ballot at the polling place near her Manhattan apartment. Alice Paul voted for the first time in her life nearby in New Jersey. The Tennessee Suffs voted in their districts. At Hyde Park, Eleanor Roosevelt also voted for the first time, probably for her husband and the Cox/FDR Democratic ticket.
On the morning of Election Day, Josephine Pearson went to her polling site, but she wasn’t planning on voting. She came to pass out pamphlets claiming the Nineteenth Amendment was illegal. The poll watchers were surprised to see her: You’re not voting? they asked. She declined, but men at the polls came up with a solution: “Tell us what you want voted and we’ll vote for you!” In every subsequent election, Josephine Pearson had a local man cast her ballot for her.
The ten million women who voted helped to elect Warren G. Harding in a landslide. The nation was weary. Money was tight for many Americans. People were frightened by dramatic newspaper headlines and by the threat of rising power in Russia. So, many of them embraced Harding’s promise of “America First”—which meant a withdrawal from any international entanglements, including the League of Nations. Fearful that a white, Christian majority was being threatened by immigration, the new administration and Congress would soon close American borders to new immigrants.
Americans picked a conservative president who promised a “Return to Normalcy” after a disruptive war. They hoped to reclaim a sense of security after a difficult era. Unfortunately, Harding’s character was weak, and his short term (he died of a heart attack in his third year in office) was defined by corruption and scandal.
Governor Albert Roberts lost his election that November. His effort to ratify the suffrage amendment didn’t do him any favors at the polls. Angry Antis voted against him, instead checking off the name of Republican Alf Taylor. Carrie Catt was greatly disappointed to hear of Albert’s loss. Suffrage’s brave friends should be rewarded, not punished, she believed. She wrote him a personal letter of sympathy—and of gratitude.
Even so, Harry Burn was thriving. To the delight of the Woman’s Party and NAWSA women, he was reelected to the Tennessee legislature by the citizens of Niota.
Overall, the voting turnout was disappointing to the suffragists. In the end, after all that struggle, only a third of eligible women cast ballots in the election.
People expected Carrie Catt to explain what had happened. It wasn’t because of a lack of enthusiasm, she insisted. It was difficult to register to vote with so little time—only ten weeks—between ratification and the election. And some women who wanted to vote were prevented from doing so. To prevent black women from voting, Mississippi and Georgia refused to extend their registration deadlines.
But Carrie wasn’t discouraged. She had her work cut out for her. Now that she’d helped secure the vote, her next order of business was to get as many women as possible out there and voting in the next election.
Carrie’s group, the League of Women Voters (LWV), was up for the task. The league’s goal was (and still is) to educate voters—men and women, immigrants and American-born citizens—of all ages. It informs women and girls on how to get involved in political issues and activism—on “making democracy work.” The League of Women Voters is still active in all fifty states, after over a hundred years. Carrie Catt herself continued as the LWV’s honorary president and national board member for the rest of her life.
On that same Election Day 1920, racist incidents unfolded across the country. In Boston, black women got fake notices warning them that they might face fines and prison if they registered to vote. Throughout the southern states, black women were intimidated and assaulted. State troops were on call to guard polling places. But the state troopers were all white—and failed to adequately protect black people who were attempting to vote. The NAACP’s request for federal troops to protect black voters from harassment was denied.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was established in 1909. Its mission is “to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all people.”
Nearly four thousand black women and men were denied their voting ballots in Jacksonville, Florida. The worst episode of violence was in Ocoee, Florida, near Orlando, where the Ku Klux Klan murdered as many as fifty black men and women who had attempted to vote. They lynched several men, and a woman burned to death as the white mob set fire to twenty-five homes and two churches in the black section of town.
After the election, NAACP officers testified before Congress and brought evidence of the violent suppression of black voters in the southern states. A veteran white suffragist, Mary Ovington, implored other suffragists to rise to the occasion: “We must not rest until we have freed the black as well as white of our sex,” she implored. “Will you not show us how to make the 19th Amendment the democratic reality that it purports to be?” But many other white suffragists, satisfied that they finally had their own right to vote, ignored the plight of their black sisters.
To suppress is to forcefully prevent something from happening.
To this day, Congress has never used its powers to punish states for voting rights violations. The United States government looked away as black voters were violently suppressed from voting for decades. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black citizens were given the legal tools to challenge the ways their constitutional right to vote had been violated.
But in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the act’s most effective enforcement tool: Section 5, which requires states with a history of racial discrimination to seek federal approval before making any changes to voting rules. Voter suppression throughout the United States—in the South, as well as in districts in other states with minority populations—remains a serious problem. In most states, access to the vote is taken away from people who have served time in prison, even after they are released.
Voting rights continue to be threatened in states across the country. There are restrictive registration requirements. Voter ID laws. Limitation on early voting opportunities. There are also inadequate polling place resources in neighborhoods whose populations are mostly people of color, specifically black, Latino, and Native American neighborhoods.
Although white women got the vote in 1920, other Americans were forced to wait. Native Americans weren’t granted citizenship and suffrage until 1924—yet many Native Americans were still banned from voting by state laws until the 1950s. Asian American women and men weren’t permitted to become citizens or vote until the late 1940s. African Americans in southern states had suffrage on paper, but they weren’t allowed to really freely vote until 1965. Many still face obstacles today.
After the fight for suffrage was won, the women of the movement set off in new directions. Carrie Catt led the women of NAWSA into its successor organization, the League of Women Voters, and into its mission of voter education and issue advocacy. Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party kept going, with new ambitious goals. Winning suffrage was just the first step toward full equal rights for women. Women deserved equality in every part of their lives: in education, the workplace, and their professions. For Alice and her Woman’s Party colleagues, the fight would go on.
Sue White stayed with the Woman’s Party while she joined the staff of Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar in Washington. She was able to achieve her dream of becoming a lawyer, earning her degree in 1923. With the help of Sue White, Alice Paul and Woman’s Party activist Crystal Eastman drafted the Equal Rights Amendment—a constitutional amendment prohibiting discrimination on account of sex. The amendment was introduced into Congress in 1923. Almost one hundred years later, in January 2020, the ERA was ratified by a thirty-eighth state—Virginia—which meant it had reached the threshold for ratification. (The threshold is three-quarters of the states.) Although the deadline imposed by Congress for ratification had long since expired, there are questions about whether such a deadline is unconstitutional. It is likely that the future of the ERA, and its ratification, will be decided by the courts.
Following their loss in 1920, the Antis grew in power over the next decades. Immediately after ratification, Anti women switched to fighting against federal government programs for maternal and child welfare, an end to child labor, and public health programs. These programs, they asserted, were “radical” and Communist-inspired plots to secretly destroy the American family.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the “second wave” of feminism opened up to a new generation the national conversation about women’s rights. Second-wave feminists demanded total equality. In the workplace. In their homes. In their classrooms. On the sports field. They demanded control of their own bodies, their own careers, and their own bank accounts. Many of these issues are still discussed today. After all, on average, working women still earn 20 percent less than working men. But there’s been some definite progress. More women have entered the ranks of corporate executives, and half of medical and law school students are now female. In the most recent Congress, about 25 percent of representatives are women. So are three of the nine Supreme Court justices.
The suffragists’ struggle has inspired other American social justice movements for over a century. Their lobbying and grassroots organizing, their nonviolent protests, their use of legal challenges—all these techniques influenced black civil rights campaigners, anti–Vietnam War protest groups, and AIDS and LGBTQ+ activists. The future will undoubtedly bring more causes to fight for, but the suffragists proved that passionate civic activism can triumph over outdated and unequal rules and laws.
Luckily, there’s a strong legacy for us all to look to. The fight goes on.
On the ninety-sixth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment—August 26, 2016—more than four hundred people gathered in Nashville’s Centennial Park. A small group of Tennessee women activists, calling themselves the Perfect 36 Society, had raised almost $1 million to commission a statue. It would be dedicated as the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument.
The bronze statue depicts five heroines of the Nashville ratification battle, striding confidently together. Four are Tennessee Suffs—Sue White, Anne Dudley, Abby Milton, and Frankie Pierce—and the fifth is Carrie Catt. They look like they’re setting out on a march, moving forward proudly.
On the morning of the dedication, many women in the audience were dressed in classic suffrage costumes—long white dresses with yellow sashes and flowers. Everyone wore yellow rosebuds. Anne Dudley’s grandson and great-grandchildren were there. So were the descendants of Governor Albert Roberts. Speakers gave emotional thanks to the suffrage pioneers.
When the statue was unveiled, crowds surged forward to admire and touch it. Mothers brought their daughters to stand at its feet. Here were the activists who’d fought in that last great battle for woman’s suffrage. Smiling Tennesseans, black and white, posed for photos and selfies with their heroic foremothers.
Ten weeks later, on Election Day 2016, in celebration of the possibility that a woman might be elected president of the United States, thousands of women made an emotional pilgrimage: first to their polling place and then to a cemetery. They cast their ballots for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman to run for president as the candidate of a major political party. Then they visited the graves of the suffrage leaders who’d won that ballot for them. In Rochester, New York, almost ten thousand women brought flowers and their “I VOTED” stickers to decorate Susan B. Anthony’s headstone. In New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery, women voters decorated Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Carrie Catt’s graves. In New Jersey, Alice Paul’s grave was showered with bouquets, stickers, and thank-you notes. And in Nashville, the new woman’s suffrage monument in Centennial Park was covered with bouquets of yellow roses.
