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Women’s rights / Explainer

The 19th Amendment and the long fight for women’s suffrage

How American women won the vote, from Seneca Falls to ratification in 1920, and why many women still could not vote for decades afterward.

By the Addicting Info editorsPublished October 14, 2026Reviewed October 14, 20262 min read

The 19th Amendment reads, in full: “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.” It took more than 70 years of organizing to get those two sentences into the Constitution.

A timeline

  • 1848: The Seneca Falls Convention in New York adopts the Declaration of Sentiments, which includes a demand for the vote.
  • 1869: The movement splits over the 15th Amendment, which barred racial discrimination in voting but said nothing about sex. Wyoming Territory grants women the vote the same year.
  • 1878: A women’s suffrage amendment is first introduced in Congress. It is reintroduced for decades.
  • 1890s to 1910s: Western states, led by Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho, grant women full voting rights. Activists combine state campaigns with national pressure, including the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington and pickets of the White House starting in 1917.
  • June 4, 1919: Congress passes the amendment and sends it to the states.
  • August 18, 1920: Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify, meeting the three-quarters threshold. A young legislator, Harry Burn, changed his vote after a letter from his mother.
  • August 26, 1920: The amendment is certified.

Who still couldn’t vote

The amendment barred discrimination by sex, not every barrier. In much of the South, Black women, like Black men, were kept from voting by poll taxes, literacy tests and violence until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many Native Americans were not recognized as citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and some states blocked them from voting into the 1950s and 1960s. Asian immigrants were barred from naturalizing, and therefore from voting, until the 1940s and 1950s.

After the vote

Women’s turnout initially lagged men’s. Since 1980, women have voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election, according to Census survey data compiled by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Quotes that cast women’s suffrage as a mistake still circulate online, often stripped of context; checking the original source is the first step before sharing one.

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