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After the 19th: The ratification of the 19th Amendment was just one step in the battle for voting rights
“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.”
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.
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.
“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 effectiveness. Literacy tests were not finally abolished in the South until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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.
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 registrars with federal examiners, dispatched federal observers to monitor elections, forced states with the worst histories of voting discrimination to clear electoral changes with the federal government to prevent future discrimination, and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials.”
— Mary Church Terrell, 1920
This bipartisan piece of legislation was catalyzed, Berman writes, by the footage of police brutality against Civil Rights protestors in Selma, Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had called for the march on Selma to protest the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot by the police during a protest for voting rights. Jackson had made five unsuccessful attempts to register to vote in his county.
A mere eight days after images of violence shocked and outraged the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the VRA. Berman relates the President’s words: “It is wrong — deadly wrong — to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.”
The results of the VRA were seismic, particularly in the South. According to Berman, registered Black voters in the South increased from 31% in 1965 to 73% in following decades, and “Black elected officials increased from fewer than 500 to 10,500 nationwide; the number of Black members of Congress increased from 5 to 44.”
The VRA likewise removed obstacles that remained for people with disabilities. The law requires election officials to allow assistance for a person with a physical disability, and “prohibits conditioning the right to vote on a citizen being able to read or write, attaining a particular level of education, or passing an interpretation ‘test,’" according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 1971, the 26th Amendment further expanded the right to vote by lowering the voting age to 18. Long discussed, the idea was included in the 1970 Congressional re-authorization of the VRA. Following a Supreme Court challenge, Congress proposed the 26th Amendment, which the states ratified in less than four months — the quickest ratification in history, according to the National Constitution Center.
People with disabilities gained further voting access through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. According to the American Bar Association, the ADA requires accessible locations for voter registration and polling, effective communication (including services like sign language interpretation and alternative material formats) and reasonable modification to accommodate individual needs. HAVA further requires jurisdictions responsible for federal elections to “provide at least one accessible voting system for persons with disabilities at each polling place in federal elections,” according to the Department of Justice.
The expansion of voting rights may not be a direct result of the enfranchisement of women in the 19th Amendment. But the premise — and the promise — of the 19th Amendment was equality, and in that fight, women have always been at the fore.
The suffrage movement was far from perfect, but it prepared the way for change, and it contained the seeds of greater things. For Freedman, the Stanford historian, the enduring lessons of the 19th Amendment are alliance, compassion and cooperation.
“I think that one of the things we’ve learned over the decades is the importance of alliance, of being wary of single-issue causes,” Freedman said. “We need to keep our vision broad. What do the rights we seek at any given moment mean for people who are different from us? How can we support the rights that others seek and find the overlapping links between them?”
Important Voting Milestones Following the 19th Amendment
1961 | 23RD AMENDMENT
Citizens of Washington, D.C., gained the right to vote for the U.S. President. Still today, Washington, D.C., is not represented in Congress.
1964 | 24TH AMENDMENT
This guaranteed that the right to vote in federal elections could not be denied to a citizen because of a failure to pay any tax.
1965 | VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965
This landmark legislation prohibited racial discrimination in voting, enforcing voting rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments and securing the right to vote for racial minorities including Black and Native American voters.
1971 | 26TH AMENDMENT
This amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age to 18.
1990 | AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT
While the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited literacy tests as a requirement for voters, the ADA further protected the voting rights of individuals with disabilities.
2002 | HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT
This voting reform effort requires states to comply with a federal mandate for provisional ballots, disability access, centralized and computerized voting lists, electronic voting and the requirement that first-time voters present identification before voting.
2009 | MILITARY AND OVERSEAS EMPOWERMENT ACT
This act established more efficient means for troops stationed overseas to request and receive absentee ballots through the mail or electronically.
