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How women got the right to vote:
The celebration of our League’s centennial this month reminds us of the long struggle to win women’s right to vote. It all came down to a young Tennessee legislator who listened to his mom.
The right to vote was limited in the early days of our country’s history to men of privilege. But by the 1830s and 1830s, white men in most states could vote regardless of how much money they had or property they owned.
During this period, all sorts of reform groups were springing up. Temperance Leagues, religious movements, and anti-slavery groups were proliferating. In many of these organizations, women played prominent roles.
There had been rumblings about women wanting to vote in the mid-1840s, but the notion was dismissed as radical. The national women’s rights movement formally launched in 1848 at the Seneca Falls convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y, under the leadership of suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. They met to discuss women’s rights, and attendees agreed that women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.
In 1890, several groups coalesced and formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the helm. In a strategy shift, the group decided that instead of arguing that men and women deserved the same rights and responsibilities because they were created equal, they held that woman were different and that these differences would improve democracy. This argument proved popular because different factions hoped that women would support their favorite cause or point of view. Temperance advocates, for example, maintained that women would vote their way, while civil rights opponents said that the enfranchisement of women would “ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.”
Starting in 1910, some western states began to extend votes to women, but southern and eastern states resisted. Illinoisan Ida B. Wells-Barnett founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 to educate African American women about the political process. In 1916 Carrie Chapman Catt drew up a “winning plan” that mobilized state and local suffrage groups all over the country. Meanwhile, a more radical splinter group, The National Woman’s Party, began using picketing and hunger strikes to dramatize the cause. World War I slowed ratification, but finally, state by state, the 19th Amendment was ratified. “Illinois gets first honors of all the states of the union in ratification of the women’s suffrage amendment to the federal constitution," the Tribune reported on June 11, 1919.
The crucial vote for ratification occurred on August 18, 1920, in Tennessee: 35 states had ratified the amendment, but one more was needed. A special session was called and the “suffs” carried or wore yellow roses while the “antis” used red roses to symbolize their sentiments. Carrie Chapman Cates said it didn’t have a ghost of a chance to pass.
It was a contentious day with a vote to delay certification nearly succeeding, which would have meant national defeat of the amendment. A 24-year-old named Harry T. Burn, the youngest member of the legislature, had expressed opposition and wore a red rose. On the day of the vote, he received a letter from his mother urging him “to be a good boy and vote for suffrage.” He cast the decisive aye vote and the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.
Vice-President
Tina Birnbaum
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