The Republican Congress That Sent the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the States

Dinner-table history has a blind spot about the 19th Amendment, and it is a big one. The Congress that finally passed the amendment guaranteeing women the vote, in the spring of 1919, was a Republican Congress. The Republicans had just won both chambers in the elections of November 1918, and one of the first things they did when they took their seats was to take up the suffrage amendment and pass it.

I want to tell the story straight, because a lot of what gets said about it, on both sides, is slogans. Republicans do not need to claim that every Republican was a suffragist. Many were not. Democrats do not get to claim the amendment was theirs, either. The honest account is that women won the vote because women organized for seventy years, and that the final push needed votes from both parties, with the larger share coming from Republicans. Let me give you the record in order, and let you judge.

The West goes first

The story begins out West, where the frontier's practical habits ran ahead of the East's. In December 1869, the Wyoming Territory passed the first law in the nation that gave women the right to vote and hold office on the same terms as men. The territorial governor, John Campbell, was a Republican appointed by Ulysses Grant, and he signed it. Historians still argue about why the territory's legislators did it. Some say principle, some say a desire to attract settlers to a place with far more men than women, some say politics. Whatever the motives, the result is not in dispute: women in Wyoming voted, served on juries and held office, long before the rest of the country.

When Wyoming applied for statehood in 1890, Congress was nervous about the suffrage provision, and the territory made it clear it would not drop it. It entered the Union that year as the first state to let women vote, and the state has called itself the Equality State ever since. Colorado followed in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896. Washington, California, Oregon, Kansas, Arizona, Montana, Nevada and others came after in the 1910s. By the time Congress took up the national amendment, a large part of the West was already a place where women voted for President, which is why the question of suffrage in the West, and the Republican politics of those states, belongs in any serious history.

A Republican senator introduces the amendment

The federal amendment itself is older than most people think. In 1878, Senator Aaron Sargent of California, a Republican, introduced a proposed constitutional amendment on woman suffrage at the urging of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is often called the Anthony Amendment. It was introduced year after year for four decades, was ignored, buried in committee, and defeated. The text that was finally passed in 1919 is nearly word for word the text Sargent first introduced, and it is short enough to memorize: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Notice the second sentence. It is the same enforcement formula used in the 15th Amendment, which Republicans had written in 1869 and 1870. The 15th banned discrimination in voting on the basis of race. The 19th did the same for sex. The pattern is plain: Republicans have, since the party's founding, shown a repeated willingness to use constitutional amendments to extend the franchise. For the earlier chapters, see Citizenship, Equal Protection and the Ballot in the 14th and 15th Amendments.

Jeannette Rankin goes to Washington

The next landmark came in 1916, when the voters of Montana, a state where women had been voting since 1914, elected Jeannette Rankin, a Republican, to the House of Representatives. She took her seat on April 2, 1917, the first woman ever to serve in Congress. Four days later she was one of the members who voted against the declaration of war on Germany, a vote that cost her politically and that she stood by. Whatever you think of that decision, it was a public vote cast on principle, and no one could say she was a puppet of any party boss.

In January 1918, Rankin spoke on the House floor in the debate on the amendment. On January 10, 1918, the House passed it with barely the two-thirds it needed. Wilson, a Democrat who had been slow to come to the cause, had endorsed the amendment that month as a war measure, arguing that women had earned the vote through their service in the war effort. In the Senate, though, the amendment fell short in the fall of 1918, and again by a single vote in February 1919.

The Congress of 1919

Then the election of November 1918 changed the arithmetic. Republicans won control of the House and Senate for the 66th Congress. President Wilson called Congress into special session, which began on May 19, 1919, and the House took up the amendment right away. On May 21, 1919, the House voted 304 to 89 in favor. On June 4, 1919, the Senate followed, 56 to 25. That put the amendment over the two-thirds mark in both chambers, and it went to the states for ratification.

Here is the party breakdown, as it is commonly cited. I want to be careful, because numbers like these are easy to misremember. Please check them against the official records in the Congressional Record and at Senate.gov and the House Clerk's website. If I have any of them wrong, I want you to be able to catch it.

Do the sums. In the House: 200 plus 102 is 302, and the remaining two yes votes came from members of other parties, giving 304. The no votes: 19 plus 70 equals 89. In the Senate: 36 plus 20 equals 56 yes, and 8 plus 17 equals 25 no. Now the shares. In the House, 200 of 219 Republicans who voted said yes, which is 91 percent. 102 of 172 Democrats said yes, which is 59 percent. In the Senate, 36 of 44 Republicans said yes, about 82 percent, while 20 of 37 Democrats said yes, about 54 percent. Republicans supplied the clear majority of yes votes in both chambers. Some prominent Democrats, in the White House and in Congress, were strong supporters, and the no votes in both parties came disproportionately from the South and from some Northeastern conservatives. So this was a bipartisan achievement with a Republican majority behind it. Both parts of that sentence are true.

The long road through the states

Congress could pass the amendment. Ratification took three-fourths of the states, thirty-six of the forty-eight then in the Union. In June 1919, Illinois and Wisconsin were among the first to ratify. Over the next year, state after state followed, mostly Northern and Western ones. The Southern states mostly refused. Several, including Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, voted it down, and the arguments they used were openly tied to states' rights and, often, to the fear of Black women voting.

By the summer of 1920, the count stood at thirty-five states, with one more needed. The nation's eyes turned to Tennessee, where the legislature met in a special session in Nashville in August. The Senate approved it. In the House, the vote was razor close, and the deciding moment came when a twenty-four-year-old Republican legislator from East Tennessee, Harry Burn, who had been wearing a red rose in his lapel to signal his opposition, voted yes. He later explained that he had received a letter from his mother urging him to support it. Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state on August 18, 1920. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the amendment on August 26. In November 1920, women across the nation voted in a presidential election for the first time, and the winner was Warren Harding, the Republican.

I find the Harry Burn story both charming and instructive. It was not a speech or a poll or a pressure campaign that tipped it, in the end. It was one young man deciding what was right, one Republican from the hill country, after years of work by thousands of women who had not been allowed to vote for him.

The best argument against it, and why it lost

I promised a fair hearing, so here is the strongest case the opponents made, because some of them were conservatives of good character who thought they were defending something real.

The argument ran like this. The Constitution leaves the qualifications of voters mostly to the states. Article I, Section 2 says the people who vote for the House are those who can vote for the most numerous branch of their own state legislature. If a state wanted to extend the vote to women, that was the state's business, and decades of western experience showed the states could do it. A national amendment, the opponents said, would override the judgment of states that had decided otherwise, and would do it in a time of war and emotion.

Here is the answer, in three steps.

1. The amendment process is in the Constitution. Article V provides for exactly this: two-thirds of each chamber, then three-fourths of the states. An amendment that goes through that process is not a federal override of the states. It is the states, in the number the Constitution requires, deciding together.
2. There was precedent. The 15th Amendment had already limited what the states could do on the question of who votes. Nobody thought it unconstitutional, and the 19th used the same method and nearly the same words.
3. The states were not going to do it alone. Twenty-some years of state-by-state work had brought the vote to women in much of the West. In the South and in much of the East, the legislatures had shown no sign of moving. The question was whether half the adult population would wait another generation.

I think the federalism argument was a serious one, and it is the same one conservatives make today about many other subjects. In this case, I believe it lost on the merits. The amendment extended a basic right of citizenship through the Constitution's own amending process, and the people's elected representatives in three-fourths of the states ratified it.

The unfinished arguments of that time

A fair history does not stop at the celebration. Here are the arguments that the amendment left open.

Who actually got to vote. The amendment said sex could not be a reason to deny the vote. It did not say that states could not find other reasons. In the Jim Crow South, poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation kept most Black women, like most Black men, away from the polls for another generation. The 24th Amendment in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are what finally opened that door. The story of the earlier failure to protect the vote is in The 1890 Lodge Force Bill and the Elections Law Republicans Could Not Pass.

Native Americans and immigrants. Many Native Americans were not citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, signed by Calvin Coolidge, and some states kept them from the polls for years after that. Immigrants from Asia were barred from becoming naturalized citizens for decades, and so could not vote regardless of sex.

What the amendment was for. Suffragists disagreed with each other. Some argued from simple equality: citizens are citizens. Others argued that women would bring a moral influence to politics, in areas like temperance, child welfare and public health. The 18th Amendment, establishing Prohibition, had been ratified in January 1919, and the two causes overlapped. Neither argument is dishonorable, but they led to different politics. The one thing every honest historian will tell you is that no one could predict how women would vote, and that women have never voted as a single bloc.

The Equal Rights Amendment. In 1923, Alice Paul's National Woman's Party proposed another amendment to ban discrimination by sex across the board. That fight went on for decades. Conservatives have, over the years, made serious arguments on both sides of it, about whether a new amendment is needed when the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws already apply. I'll leave that argument to another day.

What a Republican voter should take from this

Three takeaways, and I'll label them.

Fact: Women got the vote through the work of generations of women, not through the gift of a political party. The people to credit first are the suffragists, from Anthony and Stanton to Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. The Republican role was real and it was supporting.

Fact: Republicans in Congress, and the West's Republican-leaning voters, supplied the majority of the votes that carried it. The Congress of 1919 delivered where earlier Congresses, of both parties, had not.

Judgment, mine: The best use of this history is not to score points against the other party. It is to remember that expanding the franchise has always been a conservative cause at its best, because it ties more citizens to the constitutional order. When someone tells you the Republican Party has never cared about who gets to vote, you have a dated answer. And when someone tells you the party has always cared, you should answer honestly that it took the Lodge bill's failure, the Jim Crow decades and many other chapters to get anywhere near the goal.

If you want the surrounding story of the party's changing coalition, read Taft, Roosevelt and the Convention Fight That Split the Party in 1912, where the Progressive platform of 1912 had put woman suffrage in its program, and McKinley and Bryan in 1896 Compared as Two Ways to Run for President, where the Western silver states first showed how independent the region could be.

The bottom line

• The 19th Amendment passed Congress in May and June of 1919 under a Republican majority, and Republicans supplied most of the yes votes. Check the exact roll calls yourself at Senate.gov and in the Congressional Record.
• Wyoming's territorial law of 1869, Montana's election of Jeannette Rankin and the Western states' early suffrage laws show that the West led the nation on this issue.
• The amendment did not finish the work. Black women in the South, Native Americans and Asian immigrants faced other barriers for decades. A fair telling includes them.
• Do not turn the story into a slogan, either way. Women won the vote by seventy years of work, with votes from both parties in the final push.
• On the next Election Day, take someone with you who has never voted. It is the best way to honor the people who had to fight for it.