jan 1, 1920 - 19thammendment grants women suffrage

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National Woman's Party (NWP):A political party founded in 1916 that fought for women’s suffrage, and after helping to achieve that goal in 1920, advocated for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (


Women were the largest group to take advantage of wartime job opportunities. About 1 million women joined the paid labor force for the first time, while another 8 million gave up low-wage service jobs for higher-paying industrial work. Americans soon got used to the sight of female streetcar conductors, train engineers, and defense workers. Though most people expected these jobs to return to men in peacetime, the war created a new comfort level with women’s employment outside the home — and with women’s suffrage.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) threw the support of its 2 million members wholeheartedly into the war effort. Its president, Carrie Chapman Catt, declared that women had to prove their patriotism to win the ballot. NAWSA members in thousands of communities promoted food conservation and distributed emergency relief through organizations such as the Red Cross.

Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP) took a more confrontational approach toward the promotion of women’s suffrage. Paul was a Quaker who had worked in the settlement movement and earned a PhD in political science. Finding as a NAWSA lobbyist that congressmen dismissed her, Paul founded the NWP in 1916. Inspired by militant British suffragists, the group began in July 1917 to picket the White House. Standing silently with their banners, Paul and other NWP activists faced arrest for obstructing traffic and were sentenced to seven months in jail. They protested by going on a hunger strike, which prison authorities met with forced feeding. Public shock at the women’s treatment drew attention to the suffrage cause.

Impressed by NAWSA’s patriotism and worried by the NWP’s militancy, the antisuffrage Wilson reversed his position. In January 1918, he urged support for woman suffrage as a “war measure.” The constitutional amendment quickly passed the House of Representatives; it took eighteen months to get through the Senate and another year to win ratification by the states. On August 26, 1920, when Tennessee voted for ratification, the Nineteenth Amendment became law. The state thus joined Texas as one of two ex-Confederate states to ratify it. In most parts of the South, the measure meant that white women began to vote: in this Jim Crow era, African American women’s voting rights remained restricted along with men’s.

In explaining suffragists’ victory, historians have debated the relative effectiveness of Catt’s patriotic strategy and Paul’s militant protests. Both played a role in persuading Wilson and Congress to act: the Woman’s Party built public attention and pressure, while the presence of NAWSA enabled the president to justify suffrage as a “reward” for loyal women’s service. Neither strategy might have worked, however, without the extraordinary impact of the Great War. Across the globe, before 1914, the only places where women had full suffrage were New Zealand, Australia, Finland, and Norway. After World War I, many nations moved to enfranchise women. The new Soviet Union acted first, in 1917, with Great Britain and Canada following in 1918; by 1920, the measure had passed in Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as well as the United States. (Major exceptions were France and Italy, where women did not gain voting rights until after World War II, and Switzerland, which held out until 1971.) Thus, while World War I introduced modern horrors on the battlefield — machine guns and poison gas — its positive side effects included women’s political rights and, in the United States, new economic opportunities.

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