Voting Rights Celebrated in August

As a result, women are celebrating only the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Tennessee ratified it on August 18, 1920 by one vote and it was certified on August 26.
Progress in the U.S. has traveled east to west – e.g., expansion and railroads. Women’s rights are the exception. Women and ratification first gained a footing in the west and then moved east.

Resistance to voting rights was most pronounced in the South. Just as the 1965 Voting Rights Act was mostly, but not exclusively, aimed at the South’s legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, the South was also most resistant to women’s voting rights. In fact, it took until 1984 – the year of the first serious African American president candidate Jesse Jackson – for Mississippi to ratify the 19th Amendment.

Like the 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment didn’t affirm an “individual right to vote,” but only outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of SEX.

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