It took 42 years.
Twenty-eight words guaranteeing that no American could be denied the vote for being a woman. Introduced in Congress in 1878. Not law until 1920. West Virginia cast the thirty-fourth vote for it, and won it by one.
Forty-two years, in six dates
Introduced, and voted down
Senator Aaron Sargent of California introduces it at the urging of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It goes nowhere.
Reintroduced, unchanged, for four decades
The same words go back to Congress session after session for forty-one years. Women lobby, march, picket the White House, and go to jail for it. Susan B. Anthony dies in 1906, fourteen years short.
Congress finally passes it
It clears both chambers by the required two-thirds. Now thirty-six of the forty-eight states have to agree.
West Virginia says yes, by a single vote
The state Senate ratifies 15 to 14, making West Virginia the thirty-fourth state.
Tennessee makes it law
The thirty-sixth and final state ratifies, forty-two years after that first introduction.
Certified into the Constitution
The Secretary of State certifies it. That date is now Women's Equality Day.
One senator, one train, one vote
West Virginia was not an early convert. In 1916 the question went straight to the state's voters and lost more than two to one, 162,158 against to 63,540 in favor. Only two of fifty-five counties voted yes. Lenna Lowe Yost, who led the West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association, blamed a campaign that never reached the rural counties. Sound familiar?
Four years later it came to the Legislature instead. The House passed it 47 to 40. Then the Senate deadlocked, 14 to 14. The one senator who could break the tie, Jesse Bloch of Wheeling, was on vacation in California. He was sent for, crossed the country by train, and on March 10, 1920 the Senate ratified 15 to 14. West Virginia became the thirty-fourth state to ratify because one man got on a train.
From introduction to ratification. January 1878 to August 1920.
West Virginia counties that voted for suffrage in 1916, when the question went to the voters.
The state Senate margin on March 10, 1920, after Senator Bloch came back to break a 14 to 14 tie.
West Virginia's place in line. Thirty-six states had to ratify before the amendment meant anything.
What 1920 changed, and what it did not
The 19th Amendment did one specific thing: it made sex an illegal reason to deny an American the vote. It did not, by itself, put a ballot in every woman's hands.
Black women across the South were kept from the polls for another forty-five years by poll taxes, literacy tests, and plain intimidation, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Native Americans were not recognized as citizens nationwide until 1924. Asian immigrants were barred from citizenship, and so from voting, until 1952.
The right to vote didn't arrive all at once, and it has never stayed won on its own. It gets extended, contested, narrowed, and extended again, by people who keep showing up. Which is the entire argument for using it.
Two West Virginia firsts
Once women could vote, it did not take long for them to start winning.
Anna Johnson Gates of East Bank, Kanawha County, is elected to the House of Delegates: the first woman in the West Virginia Legislature, two years after ratification.
Minnie Buckingham Harper of McDowell County is appointed to the House of Delegates to finish her late husband's term, becoming the first Black woman to serve in any state legislative body in the United States.
Congressional dates and the ratification sequence: Constitution Annotated, Library of Congress.
West Virginia suffrage history and the 1920 ratification vote: e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia.
The 1916 referendum totals and the Equal Suffrage Association: Women's Suffrage in West Virginia, WVU Libraries.
Anna Johnson Gates and Minnie Buckingham Harper: e-WV and e-WV.