100 Years of Universal Suffrage, a history of struggle

Over a hundred years ago, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in Tennessee in a nail-biting vote. After decades of organizing, the question of universal suffrage in the United States lay in the hands of 96 legislators, all men and all white, who filed into the room wearing red and yellow roses to indicate how they planned to vote, yellow for suffrage and red against. Twice that day on August 18, 1920, the lawmakers attempted to table the motion and failed, the vote to table tied each time. In a roll call vote, Harry T. Burn threw down his red rose and voted for the 19th Amendment. The Speaker of the House followed suit, in what became a futile machination to later undo the vote. Burn credited his vote to a letter from his mother who had been motivated to write to him when Burn’s mentor gave a particularly racist and sexist speech denouncing the 19th Amendment. The amendment went into effect on August 26, 1920, which is now celebrated as Women’s Equality Day. The hotly contested amendment reads, “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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Contrary to what most of us learned in school, and continue to learn in school, the struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States was a fierce campaign that involved tens of thousands of diverse women who organized, took militant political action and repeatedly challenged the status quo. In a recent conversation with historians specializing in this movement, historian and curator Kate Clarke Lemay described the suffrage movement: “Women staged one of the longest social reform movements in the history of the United States. This is not a boring history of nagging spinsters; it is a badass history of revolution staged by political geniuses. I think that because they were women, people have hesitated to credit them as such.” It literally took hundreds of years for women to win the right to vote in the United States. That struggle was deep and multi-faceted and rife with contradictions that reflected the divisions of class and national oppression that characterize women as a group. The movement for suffrage was not homogenous. The movement faced deep opposition. It was also rich in militant action, organizing tactics and the building of political power for disenfranchised groups. There are many books, especially coming out this year, that detail the rich and varied history of the suffrage movement. There is a ton of eye-opening historical digging into the suffrage movement that has been shared, particularly in the last few months, for the centennial this year. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/100-years-of-universal-suffrage-a-history-of-struggle/