August 18, 1920: The 19th Amendment Is Ratified — American Women Win the Vote

At 8 a.m. on August 18, 1920, in a quiet room at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, 24-year-old state representative Harry Burn opened a letter from his mother. It instructed him to “be a good boy” and vote for suffrage. That morning, Burn’s yes — the deciding vote — ratified the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting American women the right to vote after a 72-year struggle.

The Final Battle in Nashville

Tennessee was the 36th and last state needed for ratification, and the fight there was ferocious. Anti-suffrage forces, dubbed the “Antis,” lobbied with every tool of 1920 politics; pro-suffrage activists, including young Carrie Chapman Catt, had spent decades building the movement state by state. The state senate passed ratification easily, but the house deadlocked 48–48 through two roll calls. On the third, Harry Burn — wearing a red rose, the Anti badge — switched his vote. Pandemonium: suffragists wept, Antis accused him of bribery, and Burn fled to an attic to escape the mob. His explanation became famous: “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow.”

Seventy-Two Years of Struggle

The movement began in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments first demanded women’s suffrage. It survived the Civil War’s redirection of reform energy, the long “doldrums” of the 19th century, and the final militant phase of Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels, who picketed the White House and were jailed, beaten and force-fed. By 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt’s “Winning Plan” had delivered ratification state by state — 36 of 48 states in the end.

26 Million New Voters

The amendment enfranchised some 26 million women overnight — the largest single expansion of the American electorate ever. Yet its promise was uneven: Black women in the Jim Crow South, like Black men before them, were blocked by poll taxes and literacy tests until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The centennial of August 18, 2020 was marked by statues of five suffrage pioneers unveiled in Washington’s Rotunda — and by the reminder that the fight Burn’s mother started in a letter is still being finished.