In this year of far-reaching social change, August marks the hundredth anniversary of an often-overlooked chapter in American history yet an essential part of our quest to form what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union.”
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote in all elections. Eight days later, the US secretary of state officially pronounced the amendment the law of the land.
The story of the struggle for the vote features themes of politics, protest, race, and religion that still resonate today. In fact, historians credit the Second Great Awakening, a revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with inspiring social reform in areas such as women’s rights, abolition, and temperance.
Women’s suffrage was a “too radical” resolution
Women’s legal rights had been “pretty much nonexistent,” said Dr. Beverly Zink-Sawyer, author of From Preachers to Suffragists: Woman’s Rights and Religious Conviction in the Lives of Three Nineteenth-Century American Clergywomen.
“Single women could inherit property, but once a woman married, all that she ‘owned’ (including her children) became the property of her husband. In divorce, she could be left penniless and have her children taken away from her. There were some exceptions to this in native communities—and, of course, the situation was even worse for enslaved women.”
The suffrage movement formally began on July 19, 1848, with the Seneca Falls Convention in central New York. Some three hundred people attended, including Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Many of the early crusaders for women’s rights were also abolitionists, including convention organizers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and…
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