The 19th Amendment    1920    

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The 19th amendment is a very important amendment to the constitution as it gave women the right to vote in 1920.  You may remember that the 15th amendment made it illegal for the federal or state government to deny any US citizen the right to vote.  For some reason, this did not apply to women.  The 19th amendment changed this by making it illegal for any citizen, regardless of gender, to be denied the right to vote.

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        The movement to allow women the right to vote through the 19th amendment was the Suffrage movement.  You may have heard of women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were key figures in the Suffrage movement.  The Suffrage movement has been going on since the Civil War, but the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments did not cover the rights of women to vote.  These women were the original authors of the 19th amendment although it took forty-one years before the government would even consider ratifying the 19th amendment.  Many lawmakers feared that women would vote in large groups, which would affect the outcome of elections.