19th Amendment Quotes

[Upon the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Carrie Chapman] Catt wrote ... to the women voters of the nation: The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

Suffragists had often staged political “pageants” in which they wore sashes emblazoned “Votes for Women.” But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this display: the debut of the Miss America pageant, in which unmarried women showed off their decidedly apolitical attributes in competition against, as opposed to collaboration with, each other.57 The

Women like Aislynn cast their first votes in 1870. It was not until 1919 that the US Congress passed the amendment to allow women to vote. In 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified by the 36 states needed to make it part of the US Constitution.

Their 108-year wait for another title was the longest championship drought in sports. The last time they did win the World Series, in 1908, occurred in the lifetimes of Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Geronimo, Winslow Homer, and Joshua Chamberlain, and in a world when the Ottoman Empire still existed but the 19th Amendment, talking motion pictures, electrified traffic lights, and world wars did not.

Do all you can, no matter what, to get people to think,” wrote suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment; it was ratified by the states in 1920. For the first time in America’s history, its female citizens could legally (if not practically, in the Jim Crow South) vote.

The idea [passing the 17th amendment] benefited from a unique political and cultural atmosphere that consumed a nation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries-a progressive populism promoting simultaneously radical egalitarianism and centralized authoritarianism.