ON THIS DAY AUGUST 17 2023

This Day in History: August 18

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1920






Nineteenth Amendment ratified


On this day in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified after Tennessee—by just one vote—became the 36th state to approve it, capping the 72-year fight to win women the right to vote in the United States.

Nineteenth Amendment
United States Constitution


Nineteenth Amendment, amendment (1920) to the Constitution of the United States that officially extended the right to vote to women.
Opposition to woman suffrage in the United States predated the Constitutional Convention (1787), which drafted and adopted the Constitution. The prevailing view within society was that women should be precluded from holding office and voting—indeed, it was generally accepted (among men) that women should be protected from the evils of politics. Still, there was opposition to such patriarchal views from the beginning, as when Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, asked her husband in 1776, as he went to the Continental Congress to adopt the Declaration of Independence, to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” In the scattered places where women could vote in some types of local elections, they began to lose this right in the late 18th century.



Britannica Quiz
This Day in History Quiz: June 4

From the founding of the United States, women were almost universally excluded from voting and their voices largely suppressed from the political sphere. Beginning in the early 19th century, as women chafed at these restrictions, the movement for woman suffrage began and was tied in large part to agitation against slavery. In July 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, then the hometown of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention launched the women’s rights movement and also called for woman suffrage. The American Civil War (1861–65) resulted in the end of the institution of slavery, and in its aftermath many women abolitionists put on hold their desire for universal suffrage in favour of ensuring suffrage for newly freed male slaves.



woman suffrage: In the United States, 1776–1959
Gradually throughout the second half of the 19th century, certain states and territories extended often limited voting rights to women. Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote in all elections in 1869. But it soon became apparent that an amendment to the federal Constitution would be a preferable plan for suffragists. Two organizations were formed in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association, which sought to achieve a federal constitutional amendment that would secure the ballot for women; and the American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on obtaining amendments to that effect in the constitutions of the various states. The two organizations worked together closely and would merge in 1890.





Hear Dr. Colleen Shogan talk on the 19th Amendment and the history of the women's suffrage movement
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In 1878 a constitutional amendment was introduced in Congress that would enshrine woman suffrage for all elections. It would be reintroduced in every Congress thereafter. In 1890 Wyoming became a state and thus also became the first state whose constitution guaranteed women the right to vote. Over the next decade several other states—all in the western part of the country—joined Wyoming. In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran (unsuccessfully) as a third-party candidate for president, his party became the first national party to adopt a plank supporting a constitutional amendment.

In January 1918, with momentum clearly behind the suffragists—15 states had extended equal voting rights to women, and the amendment was formally supported by both parties and by the president, Woodrow Wilson—the amendment passed with the bare minimum two-thirds support in the House of Representatives, but it failed narrowly in the U.S. Senate. This galvanized the National Woman’s Party, which led a campaign seeking to oust senators who had voted against it.


A subsequent attempt to pass the amendment came in 1919, and this time it passed both chambers with the requisite two-thirds majority—304–89 in the House of Representatives on May 21, and 56–25 in the Senate on June 4. Although the amendment’s fate seemed in doubt, because of opposition throughout much of the South, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee—by one vote—became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, thereby ensuring its adoption. On August 26 the Nineteenth Amendment was proclaimed by the secretary of state as being part of the Constitution of the United States.





The full text of the amendment is:

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.

Virginia Dare
English colonist


Virginia Dare, (born Aug. 18, 1587, Roanoke Island, Virginia colony. [now in North Carolina, U.S.]), the first English child born in the Americas. She was given the name Virginia because she was the first Christian born in Virginia.



Virginia Dare: baptism
Her father was Ananias Dare. Her mother, Ellinor (Eleanor, or Elyonor) White Dare, was the daughter of the Roanoke colony governor, John White. The Dares were among the approximately 120 settlers who left England on May 8, 1587, on an expedition sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh had intended that the settlement should be established in the Chesapeake Bay area, but the captain of their ship, the Lion, had his passengers land instead on Roanoke Island, the site of an unsuccessful earlier colonization venture.



Aside from the circumstances of her birth, Virginia Dare’s life remains a mystery. Nine days after her birth, on Aug. 27, 1587, her grandfather, Governor White, left the colony for England, acting as Roanoke’s agent in obtaining further aid and assistance for the colony. He arrived in England that November as the nation was about to go to war with Spain. It was not until August 1590 that White reached Roanoke with a relief expedition. It found no trace of the settlers—only the word CROATOAN carved on one tree and the letters CRO on another. The infant Virginia Dare had vanished along with all the other Roanoke colonists. It is believed that what survivors of the “Lost Colony” there may have been were absorbed into the Croatan tribe.


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