On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and with that signature, the United States Constitution formally prohibited denying the right to vote on account of sex. It had taken 72 years of organized struggle, dozens of failed congressional votes, and a state-by-state ratification fight that was not settled until a single Tennessee legislator changed his mind at the last possible moment.
Women's Equality Day marks that certification every August 26th, and 106 years later it remains a date worth understanding, not just as a milestone but as a legal story, one of rights proclaimed, rights withheld, and the long distance between the two.
The modern suffrage movement is often dated to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that deliberately echoed the Declaration of Independence in asserting that all men and women are created equal. But the legal argument for women's suffrage had roots even earlier, and in an unexpected place: New Jersey.
Under New Jersey's 1776 state constitution, unmarried women who owned property could and did vote. That right was taken away in 1807 through a state law that restricted voting to white male taxpayers. The erasure was deliberate and legally straightforward, which illustrated something important: the right to vote for women was not unthinkable in the American legal tradition. It had existed, and it had been taken away by ordinary legislation. Getting it back, reformers would discover, would require a constitutional amendment that no legislature could simply repeal.
When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, some suffragists believed the fight might already be won. The amendment guaranteed citizenship and equal protection of the laws to all persons born in the United States. If women were citizens, the argument went, they were entitled to vote.
Susan B. Anthony tested that theory directly. In 1872, she voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, and was arrested two weeks later for illegal voting. She was convicted and fined $100, which she never paid. Meanwhile, Virginia Minor, a Missouri suffragist who had been refused voter registration, brought her own legal challenge. In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against her, holding that while women were indeed citizens within the meaning of the 14th Amendment, citizenship alone did not confer the right to vote. States could restrict suffrage to men without violating the Constitution. The door that the 14th Amendment seemed to open was firmly closed. A new amendment would be necessary.
The amendment that would eventually become the 19th was first introduced in Congress in 1878 by Senator Aaron Sargent of California, a friend and ally of Susan B. Anthony. Its text was simple and direct: the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Congress proceeded to vote it down, or refuse to bring it to a vote, for the next 41 years.
The resistance was not only ideological. It was also political. Southern Democrats feared that women's suffrage would be used to challenge the disenfranchisement of Black voters. Some opponents argued that giving women the vote would destabilize the family. Others simply believed that politics was not a proper sphere for women. The amendment was introduced in every congressional session and defeated again and again, in committee or on the floor, 28 times before it finally passed. It was not lack of effort on the part of suffragists that created the delay. It was an entrenched political resistance that required decades of sustained pressure, marches, hunger strikes, arrests, and public campaigns to finally overcome.
Congress finally passed the amendment in June 1919, sending it to the states for ratification. Three-fourths of states, 36 at the time, needed to approve it. The campaign that followed was a state-by-state scramble, with suffragists and anti-suffragists racing to lobby legislators across the country.
By the summer of 1920, 35 states had ratified and the amendment was one state short. Everything came down to Tennessee. The Tennessee House of Representatives was deadlocked, and the outcome was genuinely uncertain until a 24-year-old legislator named Harry Burn, who had planned to vote against ratification, changed his vote after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to support the amendment. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify on August 18, 1920, and the 19th Amendment was certified eight days later. The margin by which women's suffrage became constitutional law was a single vote in a single state legislature, influenced in part by a mother's letter to her son.
Ratification did not end the legal fight. In Maryland, two women, Cecilia Streett Waters and Mary D. Randolph, had registered to vote after ratification. Their registrations were challenged by opponents who argued that the 19th Amendment had not been properly adopted, that expanding the electorate so dramatically exceeded the scope of the Constitution's Article V amending power, and that state legislatures whose own constitutions limited voting to men had no authority to ratify a contrary federal amendment.
In Leser v. Garnett (1922), the Supreme Court rejected every one of these arguments unanimously. Writing for the Court, Justice Louis Brandeis held that the 19th Amendment was a valid part of the Constitution, that the amending power was broad enough to encompass it, and that federal amendments, once properly ratified, were binding on all states regardless of their own constitutional provisions. The decision ended the most serious legal challenge to women's suffrage and settled the constitutional question definitively, though it would not be the last word on what the amendment actually meant in practice.
This is the part of the story that the standard account most often leaves out. The 19th Amendment gave women the constitutional right to vote in 1920. It did not give all women the practical ability to exercise that right, and for millions of women, the gap between those two things persisted for decades.
Black women in the South faced the same apparatus of disenfranchisement that Black men did: poll taxes, literacy tests administered arbitrarily and designed to fail, grandfather clauses, threats, intimidation, and violence. The 19th Amendment said nothing that dismantled any of it. Black women who had organized and marched and fought alongside white suffragists for decades found that the amendment they had helped win did not, in practice, win them anything in states governed by Jim Crow. Native American women could not vote in all states until the 1960s, even after being recognized as citizens in 1924. Asian American immigrant women faced immigration and naturalization restrictions that were not lifted until 1952. Latina women could not effectively exercise the right to vote until 1975, when Congress required voting materials to be provided in languages other than English.
It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 45 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that Black women were able to exercise the right to vote without restrictions. The amendment marked the beginning of a legal fight, not the end of one.
The 19th Amendment's text is narrow: it prohibits denial of the right to vote on account of sex. But its ratification set in motion a broader legal reckoning with sex-based inequality that has shaped American law ever since.
Alice Paul, who had been one of the most militant organizers of the suffrage campaign, recognized immediately that the vote was only one piece of what legal equality required. In 1923, just three years after ratification, she drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have prohibited sex-based discrimination across all areas of law. The ERA passed Congress in 1972 but fell short of ratification, failing to secure the necessary 38 states before its deadline. It remains unratified today, which means the 19th Amendment is still the only explicit constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women, and it covers only voting.
The gaps left by that narrow text have been filled, imperfectly and incrementally, by legislation and judicial interpretation. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sex-based discrimination in employment. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits it in federally funded education. The Supreme Court, largely through the advocacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her years as a litigator, developed intermediate scrutiny as the standard for reviewing sex-based classifications under the 14th Amendment. That standard is more protective than the rational basis test applied to most laws, but less demanding than the strict scrutiny applied to racial classifications, a gap that the ERA would close if it were ever ratified.
Women's Equality Day commemorates the certification of the 19th Amendment, which is worth commemorating. But the legal history of the amendment is also a history of what a single constitutional provision cannot accomplish on its own. The right to vote was fought for across 72 years, won by a single vote, challenged in the Supreme Court within two years of ratification, and then delivered incompletely to millions of the women it was supposed to protect. The broader legal equality that suffragists understood the vote to be the foundation of, the ERA that Alice Paul began drafting in 1923, has still not been achieved at the constitutional level.
That is not a reason to diminish what the 19th Amendment accomplished. It is a reason to understand it clearly. A constitutional amendment that changed what was legally possible for women in America, and that has been invoked, built upon, and argued over for more than a century, is not a settled matter. It is an ongoing legal project. At 106, it still is.
If this piece sparked your interest in the legal history of civil rights and constitutional law, there is more to explore on the Lawline blog. From Juneteenth's legal journey to the Declaration of Independence as a legal document, history has a way of showing up in the courtroom.
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