Nineteenth

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ratified on August 18, 1920, and certified by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby on August 26, 1920, guarantees that "[t]he 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." Its single operative sentence is modeled directly on the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), which used identical phrasing to bar racial disenfranchisement. Congress passed the amendment on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee became the decisive thirty-sixth state to ratify, supplying the three-fourths majority required by Article V. The amendment was popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, having first been introduced in Congress in 1878.

The amendment culminated a movement traced to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and its Declaration of Sentiments authored by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Two strategic wings drove ratification: the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) under Carrie Chapman Catt, which pursued a state-by-state "Winning Plan," and Alice Paul's more militant National Woman's Party, which picketed the Wilson White House and endured imprisonment and hunger strikes. Before federal ratification, several Western states—Wyoming Territory (1869), Colorado, Utah, and Idaho—had already granted women suffrage. The amendment did not, in practice, enfranchise all women: poll taxes, literacy tests, and white-primary devices continued to bar many African American women in the South until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled those barriers.

The Supreme Court upheld the amendment's validity in Leser v. Garnett (1922), rejecting claims that it was improperly adopted and confirming that ratification by Tennessee and West Virginia was effective. The Nineteenth's anti-discrimination logic later informed Equal Protection jurisprudence; in the modern era the Court has cited it as evidence of a constitutional commitment to sex equality. The amendment is distinct from the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed by Alice Paul in 1923, which sought broad equality of rights beyond the franchise. As of 2026 the Nineteenth remains in full force, and the centennial of its ratification was marked in 2020.

For the FSOT, the Nineteenth appears in both the Job Knowledge component and U.S. History content, where examiners test the chronology of suffrage expansion, the parallel structure between the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, and the identity of key figures (Anthony, Stanton, Catt, Paul). Typical question angles ask candidates to place the 1920 ratification within the Progressive Era, to distinguish the Nineteenth from the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Rights Amendment, and to identify the constitutional mechanism of Article V ratification. Candidates should also recall that the amendment limits both federal and state action and that its enforcement clause empowers Congress to enact appropriate legislation.