The Nineteenth Amendment, 1920

In the United States, women's suffrage advanced first in the West: Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and several western states followed. Nationally, the movement had split in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected Black men's votes but not women's, and reunited in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In the 1910s Carrie Chapman Catt pursued a state-by-state 'Winning Plan', while Alice Paul's National Woman's Party picketed the White House from 1917, and some pickets were jailed and force-fed.

Women's war work and President Wilson's eventual support helped win congressional approval in 1919. Ratification came down to Tennessee in August 1920, where the youngest legislator, Harry Burn, switched his vote after receiving a letter from his mother. The amendment barred denying the vote on account of sex, but many Black women in the South remained disenfranchised by poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation.