The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States on or by any state on account of sex. When the 19th Amendment became law on August 26, , 26 million adult female Americans were nominally eligible to vote. But full electoral equality was still decades away for many women of color who counted among that number. The federal suffrage amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex, but it did not address other kinds of discrimination that many American women faced: women from marginalized communities were excluded on the basis of gender and race. Native American, Asian American, Latinx and African American suffragists had to fight for their own enfranchisement long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. Only over successive years did each of those groups gain access to the ballot. The first generation of white suffragists had studied Native communities to learn from a model of government that included women as equal democratic actors. But the suffragists did not advocate for indigenous women. With the passage of the Snyder Act in , American-born Native women gained citizenship. Native-born Asian Americans already had U.
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Not All Women Gained the Vote in 1920
Find the full lesson plan here. When did women get the right to vote? The 19th Amendment technically guaranteed women's suffrage in the United States, but, in practice, many women of color were excluded. Teen Vogue shares some highlights from the decades-long fight to secure the franchise for all women below. The convention did not address the racism and oppression faced by Black women. This time, more than 1, people — including abolitionists Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and Abby Kelley — attended a national conference in Worcester, Massachusetts.
They were suffragists combating both racism and sexism long after the 19th Amendment was passed
Did women earn the right to vote on August 18, ? The answer is yes. The 19th Amendment states that the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. In reality, a continual disregard for the 15th Amendment--which had been ratified 50 years earlier and banned voter discrimination based on race--created a loophole to prevent black women and other women of color from voting on account of their race. Supporters of the women's rights movement in the 19th century hoped that a constitutional amendment would guarantee a right to vote for women. Some argued that the 15th Amendment was inadequate. Even though it opened a pathway for Black men to vote, the amendment still excluded women from the polls. For example, Susan B.
T he 19th Amendment, ratified a century ago on Aug. And yet most Black women would wait nearly five decades more to actually exercise that right. TIME talked to Jones about the deep roots of this activism, which often predated the work of the famous white suffragists—and which still informs present-day debates over what history is worth remembering and how to chart a path to racial equality in the future. TIME: In your book, you describe the 19th Amendment as marking a turn for Black women, but not in the way people might think. How so? Constitution includes an amendment that prohibits government from using sex as a criteria for voting rights. The 19th Amendment did not eliminate the state laws that operated to keep Black Americans from the polls via poll taxes and literacy tests—nor did the 19th Amendment address violence or lynching. Some African-American women will vote with the 19th Amendment.