Nineteenth Amendment

Originalist note

The ratification history is the Amendment's own originalist record. Agitation for women's suffrage was recorded as early as the Jackson Administration, but early results were meager: Kentucky authorized women to vote in school elections beginning in 1838 (later copied by other states), and Kansas granted women unlimited rights to vote in municipal elections in 1887. The first durable victory came in 1869, when the Wyoming Territory accorded women suffrage on an equal basis with men and continued the practice after statehood. Progress after Wyoming was slow — only ten additional states had joined it by 1914 — and judicial efforts to read a suffrage right out of the existing Constitution failed in Minor v. Happersett (1875), a challenge brought under the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A vigorous campaign then brought congressional passage of the proposed Amendment in 1919 and the necessary state ratifications in 1920. Because the founding generation is not the source of this text — the Nineteenth Amendment postdates the founding by more than a century — the wiki's usual founding-era sources (Madison's Notes, Elliot's Debates, the Founders' Constitution, Story's Commentaries) have nothing to say about it; its own drafting and ratification history, not founding-era commentary, is the relevant originalist record.

Modern doctrine (Annotated Constitution)

Overview (Amdt19.1)

In the only case in which the Supreme Court addressed the Nineteenth Amendment's effect, the Court held that a Georgia poll tax statute exempting from payment women who did not register to vote did not discriminate against men's right to vote, while noting that the Amendment "applies to men and women alike and by its own force supersedes inconsistent measures, whether federal or State." Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277 (1937).

Historical Background: Founding Era to the Civil War (Amdt19.2)

As ratified in the late 1780s, the Constitution did not prohibit states from restricting voting on the basis of sex, and from the Founding through 1865 no state consistently recognized women's right to vote in federal or state elections; several founding-era state constitutions expressly limited suffrage to men. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wall.) 162, 172 (1875) (surveying founding-era state voter-qualification provisions). Married women faced the additional barrier of coverture, the common-law doctrine under which "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage." 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 430-33 (1765). New Jersey's 1776 constitution was an early, short-lived exception, permitting propertied women to vote until an 1807 state law withdrew the right. Despite exclusion from the franchise, women organized and led political reform movements from the early 1800s onward; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott's 1848 Seneca Falls Convention produced Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, asserting "all men and women are created equal" and listing the denial of women's "inalienable right to the elective franchise" among its grievances.

Historical Background: Reconstruction to Ratification (Amdt19.3)

The Reconstruction Amendments' attention to civil rights brought new focus to women's suffrage. When the Fifteenth Amendment extended suffrage protection to race but not sex, the movement split: Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869) to pursue a federal suffrage amendment, while Lucy Stone's American Woman Suffrage Association (1869) pursued a state-by-state strategy; the two merged in 1890. Federal-court efforts to read a suffrage right out of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause failed in Minor v. Happersett (1875), which held that the right to vote was not one of the "necessary privileges" of citizenship and that Section 2's reference to "male inhabitants" indicated suffrage was not an absolute right of all citizens under the Constitution. A suffrage amendment using language nearly identical to the eventual Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced by Senator Aaron Sargent of California in 1878, and reintroduced without success through the 1880s. State-level campaigns had more success: the Wyoming Territory (1869) and Utah Territory (1870) granted women full voting rights, and by 1916 women held full voting rights in eleven Western states. Renewed momentum in the late 1910s — driven by suffragist organizing under Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul and by women's World War I labor-force role — produced congressional proposal of the Amendment in June 1919 and ratification, on Tennessee's decisive vote, on August 18, 1920; Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified it August 26, 1920.

The Scope of the Nineteenth Amendment (Amdt19.4)

The Supreme Court has decided few cases interpreting the Amendment. In Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, 136-37 (1922), the Court rejected Maryland voters' argument that a state's own constitutional provisions limiting suffrage to men could deprive the state legislature of power to ratify the Amendment. Fairchild v. Hughes, 258 U.S. 126, 129-30 (1922), held that federal courts lacked jurisdiction over a taxpayer's suit to enjoin the Secretary of State from proclaiming ratification, for want of a justiciable injury beyond general citizen interest. In Breedlove v. Suttles the Court confirmed that the Amendment is self-executing and protects men's voting rights as well as women's, but found no Nineteenth Amendment violation in Georgia's tax scheme. Harper v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 668-70 (1966), later overruled Breedlove, but only on the separate ground that a state poll tax discriminates by wealth in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause — it did not revisit Breedlove's Nineteenth Amendment holding. The Court has occasionally invoked the Nineteenth Amendment's principle of "political equality" when deciding Fourteenth Amendment claims, for instance in striking down Georgia's county-unit primary-vote-counting system, Gray v. Sanders, 372 U.S. 368, 381 (1963), and in tracing the modern heightened-scrutiny standard for sex-based government action, in part, to the history of sex discrimination that preceded the Amendment's ratification. United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 531 (1996) ("[N]ot until 1920 did women gain a constitutional right to the franchise."). Unresolved questions include whether a Nineteenth Amendment claim requires proof of intentional sex discrimination and how far Congress's Section 2 enforcement power extends.

Impact of the Nineteenth Amendment Beyond the Supreme Court (Amdt19.5)

Despite the sparse case law, the Amendment's practical effect has been substantial: it added millions of women to the electorate and preceded a series of electoral firsts, including Jeannette Rankin's 1916 House election (before ratification), Hattie Wyatt Caraway's 1932 Senate election, Nancy Pelosi's 2007 election as Speaker of the House, and Kamala Harris's 2020 election as Vice President. As of January 2021, a record 151 women — about 28% of membership — held seats in the 117th Congress. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described the Amendment as "the first step toward equal-citizenship stature for women" in political and civil life. The Amendment did not eliminate voting barriers facing African-American women and other minority women, who continued to face poll taxes and literacy tests addressed only later by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

gap

The extract for this section speaks only to the Amendment's practical and political legacy, not to any founding-era source; the Originalist note above already covers the relevant ratification-era record.