19th Amendment in Tennessee: Harry Burn's Mother, Yellow Roses and a Train

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By July 1920, 35 states had ratified the 19th Amendment and the fight came down to Tennessee, where suffragists wore yellow roses and the antis wore red. This episode traces how women's voting rights were lost and won back. Women voted in several colonies before 1776, and New Jersey let property-holding women vote until 1807. After the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, the 14th Amendment put the word male into the Constitution and the 15th left out sex. The New Departure argument, that citizenship already carried the vote, failed when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against it in Minor v. Happersett in 1874.

The movement split over the 15th Amendment, with Stanton and Susan B. Anthony turning to racist rhetoric and later white leaders sidelining Black women to court Southern lawmakers, while Ida B. Wells defied segregation at the 1913 parade in Washington. During World War I, Carrie Chapman Catt framed suffrage as a reward for patriotism while Alice Paul and Lucy Burns picketed the White House and were force-fed during hunger strikes. In Nashville, 24-year-old Harry T. Burn, wearing a red rose, voted aye after reading a letter from his mother, and the Speaker and 36 other legislators fled by train to Decatur, Alabama, to break the quorum. The amendment was certified on August 26, 1920, and upheld in Leser v. Garnett in 1922.

• Lucretia Mott had watched Seneca clan mothers who could nominate and remove chiefs and veto acts of war.
• In 1917 police arrested 168 Silent Sentinels for obstructing traffic and sent them to a workhouse in Virginia.
• In 1918 Woodrow Wilson went to the Senate in person to tie the suffrage amendment to the war effort.
• Febb Burn told her son to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the rat in ratification.
• Fear of a women's voting bloc helped pass the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921, which Congress let lapse in 1929 once no bloc appeared.