August 26

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment took effect and women had the legal right to vote.

When the United States was established, voting rights were not as restricted as they would be a hundred years later. In New Jersey, women with property could vote. In other states, freemen could vote. However, by the time of the Civil War, these rights had all been stripped.

Many progressive women had banded together to work for civil rights as abolitionists. When women met at Seneca Falls in July 1848, Frederick Douglass was in attendance as well. It quite naturally occurred to several of these women that they were fighting for rights they did not themselves have. This was not universal; some women's societies felt that minorities should not be voting.

At the time of Seneca Falls, women were at the mercy of their husbands; they could not own property, enter into contracts, or serve on juries. One exception to this was the recent Married Women Property Act, which allowed women to keep property they had brought in into the marriage. During the marriage the property was under the husband's control, although it could no longer be seized for debts of the husband.

Another cause that fed into the Suffragettes was the temperance movements; alcohol was an even more dangerous bane to families when women could not control family finances nor count on law enforcement for protection.

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first major meeting of leaders in the new women's movement. Many of the attendees would not vote in their lifetime. One exception was Susan B. Anthony, who voted illegally in 1872. She was arrested, and went to court. She argued the Fourteenth Amendment applied to women; she was fined $100 which she refused to pay and in fact did not.

Voting was starting to undergo a shift. With the settlement of the West, voting was opening up for groups previously disenfranchised. Immigrants, for example, were allowed to vote in some frontier states. Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869. Many western states allowed women to vote long before the Amendment was passed. Montana elected Jeannette Rankin to the Senate in 1914. In the East, poll taxes and reading tests were being implemented.

The Amendment, after several abortive attempts between 1915-1919, finally passed on May 21, 1919 with the strong support of President Wilson. Soon ratified by the states, women could officially vote as of August 26, 1920.