Celebrating 100 Years of the 19th Amendment
A F T E R T H E
The ratification of the 19th Amendment was just one step in the battle for voting rights by Joel Sams
effectiveness. Literacy tests were not finally abolished in the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“The colored women of the South will be shamefully treated, and will not be allowed to vote, I am sure …” wrote Mary Church Terrell in a 1920 letter. “We are so helpless without the right of citizenship in that section of the country where we need it most.”
Other groups remained disenfranchised, as well. “The Women’s Suffrage Movement,” a collection of contemporary texts edited by Sally Roesch Wagner, notes that Native Americans were not universally recognized as U.S. citizens until 1924. Chinese Americans were not recognized as citizens until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, which had prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers and barred Chinese men and women from citizenship since 1882. Originally written to take effect for 10 years, the act was renewed twice — permanently so in 1902. A similar trajectory followed for Filipino Americans and Japanese Americans, Roesch writes, who waited for citizenship until 1946 and 1952.
Less than two months after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Terrell — a prominent Black activist, journalist and teacher — had been arrested in Delaware for “disorderly conduct” by a train ticket agent. Her offense was asking a question about a Black organizer for the Republican Party.
ISSUE 4 2020 | CAPITOL IDEAS
The story is recounted in “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote,” a publication accompanying the Library of Congress exhibit by the same name. Terrell’s experience summarizes the political reality in October 1920. The battle for suffrage was over, but the war for voting rights had just begun.
10
“While it is important to create these historical benchmarks and to celebrate these anniversaries, we always have to think about what we have gained, at what costs, for whom, and what unfinished agenda remains,” said Dr. Estelle Freedman, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University, in an interview on the university website. “What strengths of the movement can we adopt? What flaws do we want to avoid?” Terrell’s fears of voter suppression were prescient. Following Reconstruction, many Southern states had already adopted tactics like literacy tests and poll taxes to deter Black voters. While the 19th Amendment stated that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged on account of sex, the Southern apparatus of voter disenfranchisement remained in place and was deployed against Black women with equally devastating
In addition to blatant voter restriction efforts at the ballot box, the suffrage movement faced lingering ideological resistance. Women’s voter participation remained disproportionately low for decades following the passage of the 19th Amendment, even among white women not affected by racist disenfranchisement efforts. The authors of “Shall Not Be Denied” cite a study of the 1923 Chicago mayoral election, which found that low voter participation among women was due to a variety of reasons including “indifference, opposition to woman suffrage, and the objections of their husbands.” The authors note that women did not vote in equal proportion to men until 1980. The promise of universal suffrage was not meaningfully realized for many until a century after the end of the Civil War, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). In “Give Us the Ballot,” a book exploring modern voting rights, journalist Ari Berman details the impact of the VRA: “It suspended literacy tests across the South, authorized the U.S. attorney general to file lawsuits challenging the poll tax, replaced recalcitrant
