Washington Post

I could never take it for granted. The right to vote. Not only due to the history of how people of color and women were systemically barred from the vote here in the US, but also because my parents only gained the right to cast their ballot in Zimbabwe, the land of their birth, when they were in their 40s and Zimbabwe had finally gained independence from colonial rule. It is a right that was hard won. And the fight never ends. This month we reflect on the power of the female vote. How pivotal it is. How it changes nations and distribution of resources in more humane and equitable ways. How traditionally marginalized people constantly deal with a threat to their right to vote; constantly fight back the tide of voter suppression. This year being absolutely no exception. I am comforted to know organizations like League of Women Voters are on the task. Created one hundred years ago when the 19th amendment was passed, League of Women Voters has long fought to protect the vote of women and all those traditionally marginalized in this country.

Women make a difference when they vote, they make government more representative, more inclusive and more connected to the many people it serves. We need that right now, palpably. We are at a major crossroads. Next month an election takes place that defines our future in more ways than we can name. We must fully participate. Are you registered? What’s your voting plan? The Suffragette movement as well as the Civil Rights movement paved a way for our voices to be heard. For us to stand up and refuse to be discounted at such a time as this. 

This month we feature the very hard fought historical accounts of the right to vote, some of the facts may surprise you. We feature what black women have undergone to protect their right to the ballot. We provide tools for how you can make sure your voice does not go unheard. We are part of a legacy we can never neglect. Casting our ballot this year, at this moment is not just for ourselves or our children’s generation, it’s for the battle already fought by our foremothers, and won. 

Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post

We haven’t stuck the landing yet.

Women’s suffrage is sometimes portrayed as the triumphant end of a movement, the hard-won reward for decades of marches, protests, hunger strikes, feeding tubes. Really, it was a beginning. One of many times America has transformed itself to make the government more accountable to more of its citizens, at least in theory.

The history of women voting is still a history of having representation without being represented. Waiting for mostly male legislators or jurists to determine your access to maternity leave or abortions. Outpacing men in voter turnout in every presidential election since 1980, but noticing how pundits persist in questioning the “electability” of female candidates. Watching as a 2020 field once containing six women slowly dwindled to zero. Settling for a promise by the presumptive Democratic nominee that he will pick a woman to be his running mate.

Changing the country

The Pew Research Center recently published an extensive survey about the 19th Amendment. What did Americans think had changed in the past century, and what hadn’t? Fifty-seven percent of respondents thought there was still more work to do toward gender equality. About 32 percent thought we’d achieved it; 10 percent thought we’d already gone too far. The most jarring number in the poll: about 30 percent of men — 40 percent of Republican men; 20 of Democrats — believed that women’s advancement had come at the expense of their own.

A disappointment, but not a surprise. It’s easy to assume the 19th Amendment benefited women alone, because that’s how we often talk about it: How did women’s lives improve? But we could also ask different questions. Not, how did the 19th Amendment change things for women, rather, how did women, newly empowered, change the country around them?

The word isn’t related to ‘suffering’

The origin of “suffrage” is not suffering, although plenty of people suffered in the pursuit of suffrage. It derives from the Latin suffragium, meaning a vote or a right to vote. It can also mean a prayer of intercession, which is apt as many groups of people have prayed for the right to vote.

How can we realize that we shouldn’t incorporate new and different voices into our governance because it’s an act of charity; we should do it because those voices change our nation for the better?
Around the country, when suffrage laws were enacted, local public health spending increased, with money funding door-to-door campaigns to educate the public on preventing infectious diseases like diphtheria and typhoid fever. Child mortality declined somewhere between 8 and 15 percent, the equivalent of 20,000 deaths a year. According to another study, women’s suffrage increased education budgets, which caused children to stay in school longer — particularly children who attended underfunded schools. Spending increased for social programs and charities.

In fact, spending increased in general. Government got bigger.

And why wouldn’t it? For all of the individual laws passed on the heels of women’s suffrage, for all of the dollars disbursed and diphtheria cases avoided, the main influence of women’s suffrage was philosophical: the idea that a nation made of many different kinds of people, in many different conditions, must expand the franchise in order to govern itself well.

*Monica Hesse for The Washington Post

Photograph Courtesy Library of Congress

A noted historian examines two myths about what the 19th Amendment did—and didn’t—do for women in 1920.

When it comes to the story of women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment, two competing myths dominate. The first is that when the amendment became law in 1920, all American women won the vote. The second is that no Black American women gained the vote that year. Marking the amendment’s centennial, it’s time to replace both falsehoods with history.

Voting rights in America have always been borne of struggle. And the battles women fought 100 years ago—for a constitutional right and against segregationist and discriminatory Jim Crow laws in the South—echo in 2020 as American women continue to work against voter suppression and for full access to the polls.

On August 26, 1920, the U.S. Secretary of State certified that the 19th Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified by the required 36 states. It became the law of the land: “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 19th Amendment did not, however, guarantee any woman the vote. Instead, laws reserving the ballot for men became unconstitutional. Women would still have to navigate a maze of state laws—based upon age, citizenship, residency, mental competence, and more—that might keep them from the polls.

The women who showed up to register to vote in the fall of 1920 confronted many hurdles. Racism was the most significant one. The 15th Amendment expressly forbade states from denying the vote because of race. But by 1920, legislatures in the South and West had set in place laws that had the net effect of disenfranchising Black Americans. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses kept many Black men from casting their ballots. Unchecked intimidation and the threat of lynching sealed the deal. With the passage of the 19th Amendment, African-American women in many states remained as disenfranchised as their fathers and husbands.

Nevertheless, in fall 1920, many Black women showed up at the polls. In Kent County, Delaware, their numbers were “unusually large,” according to Wilmington’s News Journal, but officials turned away Black women who “failed to comply with the constitutional tests.” In Huntsville, Alabama, “only a half dozen Black women” were among the 1,445 people of all races and genders who were registered, recounted Birmingham’s Voice of the People, an African-American newspaper. The explanation was clear: Officials applied “practically the same rules of qualification to [women] as are applied to colored men.”

In Savannah, Georgia, officials imposed the letter of the law: “Many negro women have registered here since the suffrage amendment became effective,” reported Ohio’s Hamilton Evening Journal, but “the election judges ruled that they were not entitled to vote because of a state law which requires registration six months before an election.” This ruling meant that no woman in the state of Georgia could vote—too little time had passed between the ratification of the 19th Amendment and Election Day in 1920. This was a reading of the law meant to suppress Black women’s votes because “no white women presented themselves at the polls,” the paper noted.

Many Black women did manage to vote in 1920, though. Some had been exercising that right for several years in states like California, Illinois, and New York where women’s suffrage became law before the 19th amendment was ratified. Even more registered and cast ballots after its passage.

Photograph Courtesy Library of Congress - Mary McLeod Bethune faced violent opposition from the Ku Klux Klan and others.

*Martha S. Jones for National Geographic

LWV

Our Mission, Vision, and Value

Mission
Empowering voters. Defending democracy.

Vision
We envision a democracy where every person has the desire, the right, the knowledge and the confidence to participate.

Value
We believe in the power of women to create a more perfect democracy.

100 Years of LWV
1920 — 2020

We believe in the power of women to create a more perfect democracy. That's been our vision since 1920, when the League of Women Voters was founded by leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. For 100 years, we have been a nonpartisan, activist, grassroots organization that believes voters should play a critical role in democracy.

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

LWV is an organization fully committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in principle and in practice. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to the organization’s current and future success in engaging all individuals, households, communities, and policy makers in creating a more perfect democracy.

There shall be no barriers to full participation in this organization on the basis of gender, gender identity, ethnicity, race, native or indigenous origin, age, generation, sexual orientation, culture, religion, belief system, marital status, parental status, socioeconomic status, language, accent, ability status, mental health, educational level or background, geography, nationality, work style, work experience, job role function, thinking style, personality type, physical appearance, political perspective or affiliation and/or any other characteristic that can be identified as recognizing or illustrating diversity.

Fighting Voter Suppression

We challenge all efforts and tactics that threaten our democracy and limit the ability of voters to exercise their right to vote.

Why it Matters
Voting rights are under attack. In recent years, politicians in dozens of states have erected intentional barriers to our right to vote, including forcing discriminatory voter ID and proof-of-citizenship restrictions on eligible voters, reducing polling place hours in communities of color, cutting early voting opportunities and illegally purging voters from the rolls.

What We're Doing
We are at the forefront of the most important federal and state voting rights cases around the country. We actively oppose discriminatory voter photo ID laws, fight against attacks against the voter registration process, and hold lawmakers accountable when they try to institute last-minute Election Day barriers. We work year-round to combat voter suppression through advocacy, grassroots organizing, legal action and public education. Our efforts have resulted in the protection of voting rights and ballot access for millions of Americans.

What will the next 100 years hold?

The League of Women Voters has evolved from a mighty political experiment designed to help 20 million newly enfranchised women vote in 1920, to what it is today: a unique, nonpartisan organization that is a recognized force in molding political leaders, shaping public policy, and promoting informed citizen participation at all levels of government. To join us for our next 100 years, join your local League today!

CIDSE

There’s a tendency, when looking back on the history of women’s suffrage in the United States, to assume that it was inevitable that women would get the right to vote: By the time Tennessee became the final state to ratify the 19th Amendment, on August 18, 1920, 15 states had already granted women suffrage, starting with Wyoming, which became a state in 1890. (As a territory, it gave women suffrage in 1869.) How long could such an electoral-rights imbalance reasonably be expected to survive? 

Then again, was it really inevitable? The amendment’s passage was the culmination of probably the longest sustained sociopolitical movement in American history, and even so it came down to a single 24-year-old Tennessee state legislator’s vote—changed from nay to aye after his mother wrote him a letter lobbying him to do so—or it wouldn’t have happened, at least not in 1920. And even then, the 19th Amendment hardly put an end to systematic disenfranchisement (and not only of women) in this country. On a practical basis, Black women in the South, and to some extent Black women anywhere, still didn’t get to exercise their right to vote (as Black men hadn’t and didn’t)—not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 swept away many of the tactics vote suppressors had used for decades to thwart them. Native American women (along with Native American men) didn’t get the vote until 1924, when their citizenship was recognized (they weren’t guaranteed the right to vote in every state until 1962); all Asian-American citizens didn’t get the vote until 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act granted all people of Asian ancestry the right to become citizens. As an additional point of comparison, women in Switzerland were not granted the right to cast a ballot in their national elections until 1971. Imagine how different this country might be—socially, culturally, politically—if women had been forced to wait 51 more years before successfully seizing the right to exercise their power at the polls. Imagine how different things might be if women never got that right.

The contemplation of hypothetical, alternative histories—the conjuring of counterfactual scenarios and the spinning of stories about what the world and our lives might be like if this, this, or this had happened or not—is an endlessly fascinating pastime. (The “What if the Nazis had won?” alternative-history subgenre has lately seen a particularly strong resurgence with the bingeworthy Hollywood adaptations of The Man in the High Castle and The Plot Against America.) It’s also a deeply fraught exercise, with each counterfactual pivot triggering an endless range of possible implications and outcomes, each of which in turn sets in motion its own innumerable ripples of “what if.” We can’t say definitively how a century of women voting has shaped the world we live in or what that world would look like in its absence. But we can crunch some numbers and offer some data-driven possibilities. We can, for instance, examine state-by-state exit polling from presidential elections to see whether and how the Electoral College might have swung if men alone had wielded the ballot. 

And when we do so, here is what we find: Women’s and men’s votes have been diverging in significant ways for several decades, so much so that at least two relatively recent elections might very well have gone the other way—from the Democratic candidate to the Republican—if women had still been barred from the polls on election day.

*By Mark Jannot and Research And Reporting By Henry Robertson for Marie Claire

The 1992 election was called the “Year of the Woman” because the number of female senators tripled (from two all the way to six) and two dozen women were elected to their first term in the House, the largest number in congressional history. By contrast, this year’s election is being driven by the increasingly overwhelming determination of a significant number of women from every demographic to vote Democratic at every level of the ballot regardless of the gender of the candidate. Now the most recent polls of competitive Senate contests also reveal a gender gap of unprecedented size that threatens to topple the current Republican Senate majority.

The Democrats’ best Senate opportunity this year seems to be Arizona, where the incumbent Republican Martha McSally, who was appointed to her seat after losing her campaign for the state’s other Senate seat in 2018, is trailing her male opponent Mark Kelly by a nearly 2:1 margin among women. Kelly is famous in his own right as a former astronaut but became best known to the American public through his tireless campaigning on behalf of gun control after the attempted assassination of his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Even though recent polling shows McSally with a slight edge among male voters in Arizona (48% to 45%), Kelly’s 61% to 33% lead among female voters in the state gives him a commanding 12-point lead overall (53% to 41%). The lead is of sufficient size for The Cook Political Report’s customarily cautious predictions of Senate races to categorize Arizona as the only “leans Democratic” race among those involving a Republican incumbent.

The most profound change in American politics today and in the years to come will result from a massive movement of women into the Democratic Party. As this realignment takes place Hillary Clinton may well go down in history as this century’s equivalent of Al Smith. Al Smith was the Democratic nominee for president in 1928 and the first Roman Catholic ever nominated by a major political party. Although he lost the election, his campaign presaged the movement of Catholics into the Democratic Party in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt won the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Smith’s race was initially considered a failure, as was Hillary Clinton’s. But her defeat has set off a chain reaction likely to lead to a realignment of party coalitions and relative political strength in 2020 as sweeping as FDR’s victory in 1932.

The shocking defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of the overtly misogynistic Donald Trump put the existing trend into hyper-drive. It broke upon the national scene in cities across the country with previously unseen numbers starting with the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. Then it surprised almost everyone when it led to the election of a Democrat to the Senate in Alabama in a December 2017 special election. That result, which stemmed in significant degree from defections of Republican women in the state’s cities, suburbs and college campuses as well as a massive turnout of African-Americans, was quickly dismissed as an anomaly since the Republicans had nominated a sexual predator and pedophile as their candidate.

But no one could ignore the size and national impact the same shift had on the outcome of the midterm elections in November 2018. Exit polls that year showed women favored the Democratic candidate for Congress by 19 percentage points (59% to 40%), while men favored the Republican candidate by four points (51% to 47%). The resulting gender gap of 23 points was the widest one in the last twenty years.

*Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd for Brookings

Professor Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.  

Professor Jones is the author of Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), winner of the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award for the best book in civil rights history, the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in American legal history, and the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history. Professor Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press (2015), together with many important articles and essay. 

Professor Jones is a public historian, frequently writing for broader audiences at the Washington Post, the Atlantic, USA Today, Public Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Time, the curatorship of museum exhibitions including “Reframing the Color Line” and “Proclaiming Emancipation” in conjunction with the William L. Clements Library, and museum, film and video productions with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Charles Wright Museum of African American History, PBS, The American Experience, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Netflix, and Arte (France.) 

Professor Jones holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and a J.D. from the CUNY School of Law. Prior to the start of her academic career, she was a public interest litigator in New York City, recognized for her work a Charles H. Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia University. 

Professor Jones currently serves as a Co-president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and on the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians.

Vanguard

How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

The epic history of African American women’s pursuit of political power — and how it transformed America.

In the standard story, the suffrage crusade began in Seneca Falls in 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But this overwhelmingly white women’s movement did not win the vote for most black women. Securing their rights required a movement of their own.

In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work of black women — Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and more — who were the vanguard of women’s rights, calling on America to realize its best ideals.

Stand With Breonna

Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.

The police officers have yet to be arrested or charged. Breonna's family saw no progress in their fight for justice, so they reached out to our team at the Action PAC. We need all hands on deck!!!

Add your name: We’re calling on the Louisville Metro Police Department to terminate the police involved, and for a special prosecutor to be appointed to bring forward charges against the officers and oversee all parts of this case. We’re demanding that the Louisville Metro Council pass new rules banning the use of no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna’s home.

Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, and all charges have been dropped against Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, but our work is not done.

When We All Vote is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that is on a mission to increase participation in every election and close the race and age voting gap by changing the culture around voting, harnessing grassroots energy, and through strategic partnerships to reach every American.

Launched in 2018 by co-chairs Michelle Obama, Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monae, Chris Paul, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, When We All Vote is changing the culture around voting using a data-driven and multifaceted approach to increase participation in elections.

In the months directly before the 2018 midterm elections, When We All Vote organized 2,500 local voter registration events across the country, engaged 200 million Americans online about the significance of voting, and texted nearly four million voters the resources to register and get out to vote.