On August 26, 1920, 19th Amendment was certified as part of the U.S. Constitution, declaring that the right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex. More than a century later, the amendment remains one of the most important milestones in the history of women’s rights in the United States.
The 19th Amendment was the culmination of decades of organizing by women who fought for the right to participate fully in American democracy. The struggle began long before 1920. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other activists issued the Declaration of Sentiments, which challenged the legal and political inequalities facing women and called for women’s right to vote.
What was once considered a radical demand became the central goal of a growing national suffrage movement. The right to vote, now guaranteed to every American citizen aged 18 and older, remains our most fundamental tool to enact the change we wish to see in our nation.
Generation after generation of women organized, marched, petitioned, picketed, faced arrest, and died in pursuit of the ballot. Suffragists including Alice Paul, Ida B. Wells, Inez Milholland, and countless others helped build a movement that eventually forced the issue of women’s suffrage onto the national stage.
But the passage of the 19th Amendment did not mean that all women could immediately exercise their right to vote. The amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex, but it did not eliminate the racial discrimination and other barriers that prevented millions of Americans from voting. Black women, in particular, continued to face poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, violence, and discriminatory laws designed to keep them from the polls. Native American women and other women of color also faced significant barriers to voting.
Nevertheless, American women have shown up to the polls in droves, consistently out-voting their male counterparts. Voter mobilization has steadily put dents in longstanding gender inequality, attempting to rectify systemic discrimination embedded and enabled by America’s capitalist patriarchy.
With much improvement still to make, this progress has been threatened by the rise of far-right extremism and conservative white supremacist rhetoric. Christian nationalist leaders have called for the establishment of a theocracy and the repeal of the 19th Amendment, seeking to rip away women’s political and economic power through relegation to the domestic sphere.
Meanwhile, trad-wives’ glorified submission to male authority seeks to influence young women who, failing to recognize the hypocrisy of those who have built careers of telling other women to give up theirs, would leave them willfully ignorant of the real world consequences that come with this surrender of personal autonomy.
President Trump’s call for Congress to enact the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act continues to target millions of women whose legal name no longer matches that on their birth certificate.
We cannot allow ourselves to become complicit with this attack on our liberty, telling ourselves the risk is not real. Nor can we allow ourselves to become disheartened. History leaves to us this national inheritance, this responsibility to defend equality in all of its forms and applications. Generations of women have come before us, generations of women will come after us, and we will keep marching.