From Seneca Falls to Harry Burn's Vote, Seventy-Two Years to the Nineteenth Amendment

The Tennessee House chamber in Nashville was packed and sweltering on August 18, 1920, and half the people in it seemed to be wearing flowers. Yellow roses meant you were for ratifying the proposed Nineteenth Amendment, which would bar states from denying the vote on account of sex. Red roses meant you were against it. Thirty-five states had already ratified. One more would make it part of the Constitution, and suffragists saw Tennessee as their best remaining chance before the 1920 election. Twice that day, motions to table the question deadlocked. Then the roll was called on ratification itself, and the youngest member of the House, a twenty-four-year-old Republican from McMinn County named Harry T. Burn, who had been counted among the opponents, voted aye. In his pocket, by his own later account, was a letter from his mother, Febb Burn, a widow who ran the family farm. Among other news from home, she had written: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification." He did. The amendment passed. It had taken seventy-two years to get from a chapel in upstate New York to that roll call, and almost none of those years went the way anyone planned.

In short: Women's suffrage was won by one vote in Tennessee in August 1920, but that vote was the end of a seventy-two-year campaign that began at Seneca Falls in 1848. The path ran through a bitter split over race, a failed Supreme Court case, western states that moved first, a fight between insiders and picketers, and a ratification that still left millions of women of colour unable to vote for decades.

Two days in a chapel

Start at the beginning. On July 19 and 20, 1848, about three hundred people gathered at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, for what its organizers called a convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of woman. The meeting had been planned only days before, over tea, by five women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt. Mott, a Quaker minister and abolitionist, was the most famous of them.

Stanton drafted the central document, the Declaration of Sentiments, by taking the Declaration of Independence and changing its target. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," it began, "that all men and women are created equal." Where Jefferson listed grievances against King George, Stanton listed grievances against men: women could not vote, married women could not own property in their own names, women were shut out of most colleges and professions.

The resolutions passed unanimously, except one. The ninth resolution said it was the duty of the women of the country to secure their sacred right to the elective franchise. Even many sympathizers thought it went too far. Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist and newspaper editor, rose to argue for it, and it passed narrowly. A hundred people signed the declaration, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. Newspapers mostly treated the whole affair as a joke.

So the demand for the vote was, at the start, the radical edge of a movement that was itself radical. Keep that in mind; it is the shape of the next seven decades.

The split over the Fifteenth Amendment

After the Civil War, the suffrage movement and the abolition movement, which had grown up together, came apart in a painful way.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, introduced the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time, in its section on apportioning representation. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote on account of race but said nothing about sex. Many abolitionists argued this was the moment for Black men, and that adding women would sink the amendment. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony refused to support an amendment that left women out, and in that fight Stanton used ugly racist and anti-immigrant language, contrasting educated white women with the newly enfranchised men she disparaged. It is part of the record and should be named plainly.

The movement split. Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which pushed for a federal amendment and took on a wide set of issues. Lucy Stone and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and focused on winning the vote state by state. The two groups did not reunite until 1890, as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

The lesson here is uncomfortable for every movement. When the door opens a crack, the question of who goes through first can turn allies into rivals, and the bitterness can last a generation.

Testing the Constitution, and losing

In the early 1870s, suffragists tried a different theory: maybe women already had the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens and that no state could abridge the privileges of citizens. Was voting not one of those privileges?

Anthony tested it in person. In November 1872 she and a group of women registered and voted in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, tried in 1873 before a judge who directed the jury to find her guilty, and fined a hundred dollars. She refused to pay, and the government never collected.

In Missouri, Virginia Minor sued the registrar who refused to let her register. In Minor v. Happersett, decided in 1875, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that while women were citizens, citizenship did not automatically carry the right to vote, and that the states could decide who voted. The short route through the courts was closed. From then on it would have to be either state constitutions, one at a time, or a new federal amendment.

In 1878 Senator Aaron Sargent of California introduced the amendment that would eventually be ratified, with language nearly identical to the 1920 text. It would be introduced in Congress again and again for more than forty years.

The West goes first

While Congress stalled, the frontier moved. The Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, and when Wyoming became a state in 1890 it insisted on keeping women's suffrage. Utah, Colorado and Idaho followed in the 1890s. In the 1910s a cascade of western states, including Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas and Arizona, granted full suffrage, several of them through ballot measures.

Why the West? The reasons historians give are a mix of the noble and the practical. Western territories wanted settlers, including women. Populist and labor movements in those states were sympathetic. Political structures were newer and less locked in. And in some places, party leaders calculated that women voters would help them.

This mattered for the federal fight in a concrete way. By the late 1910s, women in western states were voters, and a member of Congress from those states had to answer to them. The state-by-state strategy, which had seemed slow and partial, was building the votes that would pass the federal amendment.

Insiders and picketers

The final decade of the campaign featured two very different approaches, and the tension between them is still worth studying.

Carrie Chapman Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association, by then a large and respectable organization. In 1916 she unveiled what she called the Winning Plan: keep pushing in states where victory was possible, while concentrating national pressure on Congress and building relationships with President Woodrow Wilson and his party.

Alice Paul, a younger activist who had learned confrontational tactics from British suffragettes, took another path. She organized a huge suffrage parade in Washington on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson's first inauguration, and the crowd attacked the marchers while police stood by. Her organization, which became the National Woman's Party, held the party in power responsible for the failure to pass the amendment and campaigned against Democrats. Beginning in January 1917, its members stood silently outside the White House gates with banners, day after day, for months. After the United States entered the First World War, their banners turned Wilson's words about fighting for democracy back at him. Many were arrested, jailed at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, and some, including Paul, were force-fed during hunger strikes.

Catt's organization publicly distanced itself from the pickets. Was that a betrayal or good strategy? Here is the honest answer: both approaches probably needed each other. The pickets made the issue impossible to ignore and made the respectable organization look like a reasonable partner. The respectable organization gave politicians a way to say yes without appearing to give in to protesters. In September 1918 Wilson went before the Senate to endorse the amendment as a war measure. The House passed it in May 1919, and the Senate followed in early June. Then came the long state-by-state ratification fight that ended in Nashville.

The arithmetic of Article V

Why did the whole thing come down to one legislator in one state? Because of the way the Constitution is amended. Article V requires that an amendment proposed by Congress be ratified by three-quarters of the states. In 1920 there were forty-eight states, so the suffragists needed thirty-six.

The first states moved quickly in the summer of 1919, many of them in the West and Midwest, where women already voted and legislators had nothing to fear from ratifying. Then the pace slowed. Much of the South was hostile. Georgia and Alabama rejected the amendment in 1919, and other southern legislatures followed them. Mississippi did not get around to ratifying until 1984. Delaware, which suffragists had counted on, failed to ratify in June 1920. By that summer the count stood at thirty-five, and every remaining state was either hostile, out of session or controlled by a governor who would not call a special session.

Tennessee's governor, Albert Roberts, a Democrat, was persuaded to call one, with President Wilson urging him on. Carrie Chapman Catt went to Nashville herself and stayed for weeks. Anti-suffrage organizers poured in too. Newspapers called the fight the War of the Roses. Lobbyists from both sides worked the hotel corridors, and legislators who had promised support began to waver under pressure from railroad and liquor interests that opposed suffrage.

This is the mechanism that made one vote matter so much. A constitutional amendment does not need a national majority of voters. It needs majorities in the legislatures of three-quarters of the states. That design protects against hasty change, and it also hands enormous power to a few legislators in the last states to act. Every amendment since has faced the same arithmetic, and some, like the Equal Rights Amendment, have stalled in exactly that final stretch.

What the other side argued

The anti-suffrage movement was not simply men protecting their power. Many of its most effective leaders were women. Organizations of women opposed to suffrage argued that women exercised real influence through the home, churches and charity, and that the vote would drag them into partisan corruption and weaken that influence. Others argued from states' rights, saying that each state should decide its own electorate. In the South, opposition was bound up with the fear that a federal amendment would bring federal attention to the disenfranchisement of Black voters.

Taking the first argument seriously, the answer the suffragists gave is still a good one. Influence that depends on persuading the people who hold power is not the same as power. The women who ran charities, schools and settlement houses had learned that they could not protect children, workers or their own property without a vote in the decisions that governed them. The states' rights argument had a simpler answer: the Constitution provides a procedure for the whole country to settle a question of basic rights, and they were using it.

Seventy-two years, and then more

Who got to vote in November 1920? Millions of white women, and Black women in the North and West. In the South, Black women who tried to register met the same poll taxes, literacy tests and threats that had already stripped Black men of the vote. Native American women were mostly not citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and many still faced state barriers after that. Asian immigrant women were barred from naturalizing by race-based laws. For many American women, the real date of enfranchisement was not 1920 but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or later.

That is not a reason to diminish August 18. It is a reason to tell the whole story. The Nineteenth Amendment was a genuine victory that took most of a lifetime. Lucretia Mott, Stanton and Anthony all died before it was ratified. The women who finished the job were the daughters and granddaughters of the ones who started it.

Harry Burn, by the way, faced fury from his colleagues and explained his vote the next day in a statement that credited his mother. He went on to a long career in Tennessee public life. Ratification was certified in Washington on August 26, 1920.

What you can do

• Check your own registration first. The voting guide explains deadlines and ID rules in your state, and how to confirm you are on the rolls.
• Follow today's fights over the ballot. Voting rules, maps and access are contested again in 2026. Track them on the voting rights and redistricting page.
• Talk to the people who decide. Use your representatives to find your state legislators. Ratification happened in statehouses, and so do most voting laws today.
• Bring someone with you. Febb Burn changed history with a letter to her son. Write to, call or drive one person in your family who does not usually vote.