A Look at the 19th Amendment 102 Years Later
By Susan Galpin-Tyree
On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment pertaining to voting rights for women went into effect and its adoption was certified on August 26, 1920. The federal amendment mandates “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.”
Yet, ratification did not ensure full enfranchisement.
Some women had limited victories for voting rights prior to the 19th Amendment. The territorial legislature in Wyoming granted voting rights to women in that area on December 10, 1869. In the early 20th century, additional states passed legislation allowing women to vote. Millions of white women already possessed voting rights when the 19th Amendment was ratified, and millions more gained that right on August 18, 1920.
However, the spirit of Jim Crow legislation and a women’s rights movement that often discriminated against non-white women prevented all women from gaining voting rights that day.
The suffrage movement and the 19th amendment discriminated against many women of color. In New York, the suffrage movement attracted a diverse range of women, including Sarah J.S. Garnet, who founded the Equal Suffrage League in Kings County in the late 1880s and organized for the vote through the National Association of Colored Women, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who led a contingent of Chinese and Chinese-American women in a suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in 1917.
White-led suffrage organizations in New York and elsewhere usually excluded women of color and sometimes told them to march at the back of parades. After the 19th Amendment passed, women of color did vote and run for office in New York, as opposed to many states that passed state and local laws disenfranchising them.
Native American women and Asian American women were prohibited from voting due to other federal citizenship laws: Native women until 1924 and some Asian women until the 1950s.
Women of color had to fight for another forty-five years to gain their own right to vote through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
