Nineteenth Amendment:

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.

Although the Supreme Court has not decided many cases interpreting the Nineteenth Amendment,1 the Constitution’s recognition of women’s suffrage has had a significant impact throughout society. As the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted at an event celebrating the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification, the Amendment “was the first step toward equal-citizenship stature for women” in the political and civil spheres of public life.2

In the political domain, the Nineteenth Amendment changed voter demographics by adding millions of potential female voters to the electorate.3 As a result, many women immediately acquired a direct role in choosing their elected leaders and representatives for the first time. Nonetheless, many African-American women and other female minority groups throughout the United States continued to face significant obstacles to voting even after the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification.4

Another visible legacy of the Nineteenth Amendment has been an increase in the number of women holding public office. As a result of the suffrage movement, the Nineteenth Amendment, and other societal developments, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries witnessed a number of electoral “firsts” for women. These included Jeannette Rankin’s 1916 election to the House of Representatives;5 Hattie Wyatt Caraway’s 1932 election to the Senate;6 Nancy Pelosi’s 2007 election as Speaker of the House;7 and Kamala Harris’s 2020 election to the vice presidency.8 At the beginning of the 117th Congress in January 2021, a record number of 151 women took office, accounting for about twenty-eight percent of Congress’s total membership.9

In addition to increasing women’s involvement in politics, the Nineteenth Amendment helped to increase women’s participation in other domains of public life. For example, during the twentieth century, women increasingly served on juries, pursued higher education, and entered the work force in the United States.10 Nonetheless, despite progress on women’s rights issues, some advocates, such as the National Woman’s Party, continued to campaign for the removal of all “existing sex distinctions” from the law.11 These advocates sought an amendment to the Constitution that would have guaranteed full legal equality between women and men.12 This proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was ultimately unsuccessful; however, efforts to obtain an ERA received new attention during the 2020 centennial celebration of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification.13

Footnotes

1

See Amdt19.3 The Scope of the Nineteenth Amendment

2

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Searching for Equality: The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond, A Conversation Between United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge M. Margaret McKeown, 108 Geo. L.J. 19th Amend. Special Edition 5, 10 (2020).

3

Sherrilyn Ifill, Foreword, 110 Geo. L.J. 1255, 1262 (2022).

4

Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote, Nat’l Archives (Feb. 8, 2022), https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/19th-amendment. State laws continued to impose barriers to voting by African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, immigrants, and other minority groups for decades until Congress’s enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other federal laws. See id.; Voting Rights After the Nineteenth Amendment, Nat’l Park Serv. (Dec. 4, 2019), https://www.nps.gov/articles/2020-crash-course.htm.

5

Biography of Jeannette Rankin, U.S. House of Rep., https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/RANKIN,-Jeannette-(R000055)/ (last visited Feb. 10, 2023). Jeannette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives almost four years before the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. Id.

6

Biography of Hattie Wyatt Caraway, U.S. House of Rep., https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/C/CARAWAY,-Hattie-Wyatt-(C000138)/ (last visited Feb. 10, 2023). Hattie Wyatt Caraway had previously been appointed to the Senate seat that her husband vacated when he died. Id.

7

Biography of Nancy Pelosi, U.S. House of Rep., https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/19519 (last visited Feb. 10, 2023).

8

Kamala Harris, Vice President-Elect Acceptance Speech, ABC News (Nov. 7, 2020), https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/read-kamala-harris-full-speech-historic-election-win/story?id=74084644 (recognizing “all the women who have worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century,” including those who advocated for the Nineteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Act of 1965).

9

Jennifer E. Manning, Cong. Rsch. Serv., R46705, Membership of the 117th Congress: A Profile (2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46705 (This statistic includes three women who took office as congressional delegates and one woman who took office as the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico).

10

Ginsburg, supra note 2, at 10, 16.

11

Reva B. Siegel, Home As Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labor, 1850–1880, 103 Yale L.J. 1073, 1209 n.549 (1994).

12

See id. After more than fifty years of advocacy campaigns, Congress proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1972. Joint Resolution Proposing an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Relative to Equal Rights for Men and Women, H.R.J. Res. 208, 92nd Cong., 2nd Sess, 86 Stat. 1523–24 (1972). The amendment would have provided that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Id. However, the amendment did not attain the necessary number of state ratifications by Congress’s imposed deadlines. See also What Happened After?: Women’s History, Nat’l Park Serv. (Aug. 15, 2019), https://www.nps.gov/articles/what-happened-after-women-s-history.htm.

13

Ginsburg, supra note 2, at 10.