Nineteenth Amendment To The United States Constitution

Nineteenth Amendment To The United States Constitution

The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. The Constitution allows the states to determine the qualifications for voting, and until the 1910s most states disenfranchised women. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. It effectively overruled Minor v. Happersett, in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to women or give them a right to vote.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the amendment and first introduced it in 1878; it was forty-one years later, in 1919, when the Congress submitted the amendment to the states for ratification. A year later, it was ratified by the requisite number of states, with Tennessee's ratification being the final vote needed to add the amendment to the Constitution. In Leser v. Garnett (1922), the Supreme Court rejected claims that the amendment was unconstitutionally adopted.

Read more about Nineteenth Amendment To The United States Constitution:  Text, Background, Proposal and Ratification, Leser V. Garnett, Effects

Famous quotes containing the words nineteenth, amendment, united, states and/or constitution:

    The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.
    George F. Will (b. 1934)

    The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    The government of the United States at present is a foster-child of the special interests. It is not allowed to have a voice of its own. It is told at every move, “Don’t do that, You will interfere with our prosperity.” And when we ask: “where is our prosperity lodged?” a certain group of gentlemen say, “With us.”
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
    Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)