“Women Must Be Empowered”: The U.S. House of Representatives and the Nineteenth Amendment

On May 21, 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives approved one of the most consequential voting rights bills in American history: H.J. Res. 1, a joint resolution “proposing an amendment to the Constitution extending the right of suffrage to women.” The landmark legislative victory was more than a century in the making and came just months after the first woman ever elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin on Montana, had secured its passage in the House during the previous term only to watch it die in the Senate. Such would not be the case in the 66th Congress (1919–1921): the suffrage amendment passed the House and the Senate in quick succession before being ratified by the states in the summer of 1920.

Named for one of America’s foremost women’s rights champions, the Susan B. Anthony amendment was only 39 words long, but it was revolutionary in its intent and sweeping despite its brevity: “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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

The struggle for women’s rights in America predates the founding of the Republic. For generations, women’s rights advocates had worked to secure equal opportunity and equal access to the vote. But in many areas of the country, what contemporaries called “woman suffrage” remained a contested and unfulfilled right long after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

/tiles/non-collection/W/WIC_Essay1_10_Women_voting_1922_LC.xml Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Women crowd a voting poll in New York City during elections in 1922. After passage of the 19th Amendment two years earlier, the major political parties scrambled to register women. But a potent voting bloc of women voters, which some observers predicted, never materialized.

In May 1919, however, the obstacles to equality had started to fall. “Never was there a more splendid response to the movement for justice to women now sweeping the world,” said Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, “than the quick and gallant action of the House of Representatives.”

“The women must be empowered to keep up their own standards, to enforce their own demands,” Rankin had said during consideration of the bill in 1917. “To do their part effectively, the women must be enfranchised.”