The 19th Amendment, Explained

(lengthy, extremely informative, extremely important, history of 19A and the frequently ugly battles, to get where we are today)


The 19th Amendment, Explained


PUBLISHED 8/22/2025 by Kendall Verhovek
It took more than a century of fighting by generations of activists to achieve suffrage for all American women.



Two images of a suffrage-era, mechanical trade card, with a young girl watching a hat box, with a lid that opens to reveal a ‘Votes for Women’ pennant, published for the American market, circa 1900. (Emilia van Beugen and Ken Florey Suffrage Collection / Gado / Getty Images)

Originally published by the Brennan Center for Justice.


What is the 19th Amendment?

The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution 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.” The amendment granting women the right to vote was enacted at the start of the Roaring Twenties, decades after a prolonged and meandering fight for enfranchisement.


When did women get the right to vote?

The 19th Amendment codified women’s suffrage nationwide, but long before its ratification, unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns. The complicated story of women’s suffrage is a winding road, from the early conventions that catapulted the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony into national acclaim to the ultimate adoption of the amendment that resulted in the single largest expansion of voting rights in American history. There is no clear starting point, though many identify the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 as the dawn of the movement.



Christina Tart, of Reading, poses for a portrait at the home of Candace Stitzman-Duley in Muhlenberg Township on Aug 24, 2020. She is the chair of the Pennsylvania Women’s Caucus of the Democratic Party, and is also a distant relative of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. (Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

As far back as the late 1830s, the push for women’s suffrage was deeply intertwined with the movement to abolish slavery. Many women who became skilled at organizing and advocacy through the abolitionist cause—including Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells and Sarah and Angelina Grimké—found their way into the suffrage movement. It would still take many decades after the earliest stirrings of the women’s rights movement for women to achieve full and equal voting rights. And for many women of color, the realization of that right would take even longer. Although the ratification of the 19th Amendment allowed Black women in the North and West to vote and hold office for the first time, in the South, millions of women of color remained excluded from the process due to the racially discriminatory tactics of the Jim Crow era.


When was the 19th Amendment adopted?

More than 160 years after women cast their first votes on American soil, Congress approved the 19th Amendment on June 4, 1919. It didn’t become part of the Constitution, however, until it was ratified by the 36th state legislature—Tennessee—on Aug. 18, 1920.


Did the 19th Amendment grant all women the right to vote?

When the 19th Amendment became the law of the land after hard-fought campaigning, white women immediately benefited from its ratification. But for millions of women of color across a significant portion of the country, gaining the right to vote would take several more decades. The 19th Amendment did not eradicate the systemic racism that pervaded the South, where most Black women lived, and other regions. Fifty years earlier, the 15th Amendment, which barred states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” was ratified. Despite this guarantee, with the blessing of the courts, states across the South enacted racially discriminatory policies—such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and felony disenfranchisement laws. These restrictions kept many Black women, Black men and other voters of color out of the democratic process until the rise of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century.



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A statue of women’s rights pioneers Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was unveiled on the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment on August 26, 2020, in New York City’ Central Park. Artist Meredith Bergmann, a lifelong New Yorker, sculpted the statue of the three main figures in the women’s rights movement. None of the woman lived long enough to see American women gain the right to vote. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

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Alice Paul and other women celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment. (Universal History Archive / UIG via Getty images)

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https://msmagazine.com/2025/08/22/what-is-19th-amendment-explained/