The New York Times, June 4, 2019: The crooked path to women’s suffrage
Exactly a century ago on Tuesday, the Senate passed the 19th Amendment, which forbade states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex. While ratification would require another year, female suffrage had won its greatest and most permanent victory. That final vote was all the more remarkable given that the Senate had recently rejected the amendment not just once, but twice. The shift of just a few senators on the third vote in early June forever transformed American electoral politics.
Some of those senators who changed their vote realized that recent suffrage victories at the state level brought more women into their constituencies. Others responded to pressure from President Woodrow Wilson, a late convert to the cause. In January 1918, he endorsed the amendment as a demonstration of America’s moral mission, but also something owed to women for shouldering the burdens of World War I at home. Just as African-American military service in the Civil War advanced black suffrage rights, women’s work in the Great War advanced their political rights.
