Center for Teaching the Rule of Law

September 6, 1870 – Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyoming becomes the first woman in the United States to cast a vote legally after 1807

9/6/2021

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PictureLouisa Ann Swain
Louisa Ann Swain (née Gardner; 1800 or 1801 – January 25, 1880) was the first woman in the United States to vote in a general election. She cast her ballot on September 6, 1870, in Laramie, Wyoming.  Or, more precisely she was the first woman to do so legally since 1807.

Born Louisa Ann Gardner, her father was lost at sea when she was young. Her mother then returned to her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, but also died soon after. Orphaned at the age of 10, Swain was placed in the care of the Charleston Orphan House. In 1814, she and another girl were placed with a family as domestic servants for a period of four years, after which Swain was transferred to another family who requested specifically for her. She stayed with them until 1820, then moved to Baltimore where a year later she married Stephen Swain, who operated a chair factory. They had four children and in the 1830s, Stephen sold his business and the family moved, first to Zanesville, Ohio, and later to Richmond, Indiana. In 1869, the Swains moved to Laramie, Wyoming, to join their son Alfred.

On September 6, 1870, she arose early, put on her apron, shawl and bonnet, and walked downtown with a tin pail in order to purchase yeast from a merchant. She walked by the polling place and concluded she would vote while she was there. The polling place had not yet officially opened, but election officials asked her to come in and cast her ballot. She was described by a Laramie newspaper as "a gentle white-haired housewife, Quakerish in appearance". She was 69 years old when she cast the first ballot by any woman in the United States in a general election. Soon after the election, Stephen and Louisa Swain left Laramie and returned to Maryland to live near a daughter. Stephen died October 6, 1872, in Maryland. Louisa died January 25, 1880, in Lutherville, Maryland. She was buried in the Friends Burial Ground on Harford Road in Baltimore.

But how is it that Swain was able to cast this ballot -- and what's all this about women voting before 1807?  Well. therein lie two tales.  First, let's discuss Swain's historic vote.  The true history of the American West has little to do with the image portray in popular films and TV shows, especially with respect to the role women played in the development of the west.  What is more surprising to many is that the prominent role of women was not the result of the American ideal, but of Spanish Colonialism.

Under colonial Spain and newly independent Mexico, married women living in the borderlands of what is now the American Southwest had certain legal advantages not afforded their European-American peers. Under English common law, women, when they married, became feme covert (effectively dead in the eyes of the legal system) and thus unable to own property separately from their husbands. Conversely, Spanish-Mexican women retained control of their land after marriage and held one-half interest in the community property they shared with their spouses.

​There were numerous landed women of note in the West. For example, María Rita Valdez operated Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, now better known as a center of affluence and glamour: Beverly Hills. (Rodeo Drive takes its name from Rancho Rodeo.) After the U.S.-Mexican War, the del Valle family of Southern California held on to Rancho Camulos, and when Ygnacio, the patriarch, died, his widow Isabel and daughter Josefa successfully took over the ranch’s operations. Other successful entrepreneurs and property holders, who defended their interests in court when necessary, included San Francisco’s Juana Briones, Santa Fe’s Gertrudis Barceló, San Antonio-born María del Carmen Calvillo, and Phoenix’s Trinidad Escalante Swilling. In a frontier environment, they utilized the legal system to their advantage as women unafraid to exert their own authority.

Because women were able to obtain wealth, they also gained political influence, thus it was that when Wyoming became an organized territory in 1869, among the innovations in its political system was suffrage for women -- or at least certain women.  Wyoming’s law allowed certain women over the age of 21 to vote, own property, and serve in office. Women who wanted to cast a vote needed to prove they were seeking citizenship, a requirement that barred Native American and Chinese women from casting votes since at the time they legally could not become U.S. citizens. Black women were able to vote under this law, but it is unknown if any did and Wyoming had very few Black residents at the time. Wyoming’s territorial government had different reasons for granting women the right to vote: some thought it would attract more women to the sparsely populated territory while others thought that women played an important role on the frontier and had a right to decide how the territory should be run.  

According to Laramie and Cheyenne newspapers, Swain became the first woman to legally cast a ballot since 1807 by 30 minutes. Swain’s vote beat that of Augusta C. Howe, the 27-year-old wife of the U.S. Marshall Church Howe of Cheyenne, Wyoming.  At the time, however, the "since 1807" was not part of the story.  Which brings us to the second tale -- the right of women to vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1807.

No one knows whether New Jersey meant to do it. Later though, the state constitution’s signers made it clear they meant to keep it. In the summer of 1776, the colonies were about to collectively declare independence, and the Provincial Congress in Trenton was in a rush to write a state constitution. The state’s framers wrote and passed it in only five days. In the document, where it explains rules for elected officials, the governor is referred to as “he”; each assembly member, “he”; each county’s sheriff and its coroners, a “he.” But for some reason, when it describes the rules for the electorate, it says “they.” All inhabitants who are worth at least 50 pounds and have lived in New Jersey for a year, “they” shall have the right to vote.

And that is how, for the first three decades of American independence, it was legal for some New Jersey women to vote, more than a century before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Even if it started out as an accidental loophole, a 1790 statute clarified that “they” meant “he or she” in seven New Jersey counties with large Quaker populations. In 1797, another statute expanded female suffrage from those counties to the entire state. For decades, there has been mostly anecdotal evidence that any women actually used this right — newspaper accounts complaining about women voting, and a copy of a poll list with two names that could have been women’s names, or men’s names incorrectly transcribed.

“This is the kind of detective work that historians love, because it’s an untold story,” said Philip Mead, chief historian at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.  Starting in 2018, museum staff led by curatorial fellow Marcela Micucci dug into the New Jersey State Archives, local historical societies and other cultural institutions looking for harder evidence.  After months of searching, they hit pay dirt.  "We found a poll list … from an election in Montgomery Township, Somerset County, in October of 1801. There were 343 voters on that list and 46 of them were women,” Micucci told The Washington Post. “I barged into [Mead’s] office, the list printed out in my hands, jumping up and down. It was very exciting.”

Since then, museum researchers have found 18 more poll lists, ranging from 1797 to 1807, nine of which contain women’s names. In total, they have identified 163 women who voted.  “This was not just some women, but quite a substantial number of women,” Micucci said.

So how did New Jersey women lose the vote?

In a most American way — on the altar of partisan politics.  By the time Washington left office in 1797, fights between the nascent political parties — the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans — were becoming so bitter that the first president spent much of his farewell address warning against them.

The situation worsened over the next decade, and with that came a rise in accusations of voter fraud. In 1802, political leaders in Hunterdon County urged the New Jersey legislature to overturn a local election, claiming some people on the poll lists were Philadelphia residents, immigrants, enslaved and, in particular, married women, Micucci said.

In 1806 in Essex County, women and people of color were blamed again when more votes were mysteriously cast than there were eligible voters.  “This was a moment, in 1807, where Americans were having serious doubts about their democracy,” Mead said. “I think [legislators] were looking for a big action they could take to restore confidence in the voting system, and they crudely scapegoated women, people of color, immigrants.” The law was changed to remove the property requirement and limit the franchise to White men only.


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August 16, 1819 – Peterloo Massacre: Seventeen people die and over 600 are injured in cavalry charges at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England.

8/16/2021

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PictureCaricature by George Cruikshank depicting the charge upon the rally
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure due to the Year Without a Summer, and worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high. At that time only around 11% of adult males had the vote, very few of them in the industrial north, which was worst hit. Reformers identified parliamentary reform as the solution and a mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons. When a second slump occurred in early 1819, radical reformers sought to mobilize huge crowds to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west of England, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organized a mass rally in August 1819, addressed by well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.

Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and several others on the platform with him. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, knocking down a woman and killing a child, and finally apprehended Hunt. Cheshire Magistrates' chairman William Hulton then summoned the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn, and between nine and seventeen people were killed and four to seven hundred injured in the ensuing confusion. The event was first labelled the "Peterloo massacre" by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier.

Historian Robert Poole has called the Peterloo Massacre 'the bloodiest political event of the 19th century in English soil', and 'a political earthquake in the northern powerhouse of the industrial revolution'. The London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region, but Peterloo's immediate effect was to cause the government to pass the Six Acts, which were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform. It also led indirectly to the foundation of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. In a survey conducted by The Guardian in 2006, Peterloo came second to the Putney Debates as the event from radical British history that most deserved a proper monument or a memorial.

For some time, Peterloo was commemorated only by a blue plaque, criticized as being inadequate and referring only to the "dispersal by the military" of an assembly. In 2007, the City Council replaced the blue plaque with a red plaque with less euphemistic wording, explicitly referring to "a peaceful rally" being "attacked by armed cavalry" and mentioning "15 deaths and over 600 injuries". In 2019, on the 200th anniversary of the massacre, Manchester City Council inaugurated a new Peterloo Memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller, featuring eleven concentric circles of local stone engraved with the names of the dead and the places from which the victims came.

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August 6, 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

8/6/2021

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PictureUnited States President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history."

The act contains numerous provisions that regulate elections. The act's "general provisions" provide nationwide protections for voting rights. Section 2 is a general provision that prohibits every state and local government from imposing any voting law that results in discrimination against racial or language minorities. Other general provisions specifically outlaw literacy tests and similar devices that were historically used to disenfranchise racial minorities. The act also contains "special provisions" that apply to only certain jurisdictions. A core special provision is the Section 5 preclearance requirement, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing any change affecting voting without receiving preapproval from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court for D.C. that the change does not discriminate against protected minorities. Another special provision requires jurisdictions containing significant language minority populations to provide bilingual ballots and other election materials.

Section 5 and most other special provisions apply to jurisdictions encompassed by the "coverage formula" prescribed in Section 4(b). The coverage formula was originally designed to encompass jurisdictions that engaged in egregious voting discrimination in 1965, and Congress updated the formula in 1970 and 1975. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula as unconstitutional, reasoning that it was no longer responsive to current conditions. The court did not strike down Section 5, but without a coverage formula, Section 5 is unenforceable. The jurisdictions which had previously been covered by the coverage formula massively increased the rate of voter registration purges after the Shelby decision.

Research shows that the Act successfully and massively increased voter turnout and voter registrations, in particular among blacks. The Act has also been linked to concrete outcomes, such as greater public goods provision (such as public education) for areas with higher black population shares, and more members of Congress who vote for civil rights-related legislation.

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July 20, 1906 – In Finland, a new electoral law was ratified, guaranteeing the country the first and equal right to vote in the world. Finnish women were the first in Europe to receive the right to vote.

7/20/2021

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PictureMiina Sillanpää, one of 19 Women elected to the Finnish Parliament in 1907 and the first female minister of state in Finland (1926)
The first place in Europe to introduce women's suffrage was the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1906, and it also became the first place in continental Europe to implement racially-equal suffrage for women. Previously only New Zealand and South Australia had approved universal female suffrage, and Finland was the second to grant women the right to stand as candidates.

As a result of the 1907 parliamentary elections, Finland's voters elected 19 women as the first female members of a representative parliament. This was one of many self-governing actions in the Russian autonomous province that led to conflict with the Russian governor of Finland, ultimately leading to the creation of the Finnish nation in 1917.  Miina Sillanpää, who was one of the women elected to in 1907,  became Finland's first female government minister in 1926.

The election followed the parliamentary reform of 1906 which replaced the Diet of Finland, which was based on the Estates and had its institutional roots in the period of Swedish reign, with a modern unicameral parliament of 200 MPs. The reform was agreed upon after a general strike in Finland in 1905 during which demands for a parliamentary reform arose especially among the Socialists. This coincided with similar development in Russia which too saw a general strike and, after the Russo-Japanese War, the birth of a new institution, the Duma. This background explains why Emperor Nicholas II of Russia allowed the parliamentary reform in Finland.

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July 19, 1848 - The Seneca Falls Convention Convenes

7/19/2021

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PictureA printed card of the signatories to the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Convention
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention held in the United States. It advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman". Held in the Wesleyan Chapel of the town of Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19–20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other women's rights conventions, including the Rochester Women's Rights Convention in Rochester, New York, two weeks later. In 1850 the first in a series of annual National Women's Rights Conventions met in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Female Quakers local to the area organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was not a Quaker. They planned the event during a visit to the area by Philadelphia-based Lucretia Mott. Mott, a Quaker, was famous for her oratorical ability, which was rare for non-Quaker women during an era in which women were often not allowed to speak in public.

The meeting comprised six sessions including a lecture on law, a humorous presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society. Stanton and the Quaker women presented two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for signatures. A heated debate sprang up regarding women's right to vote, with many – including Mott – urging the removal of this concept, but Frederick Douglass, who was the convention's sole African American attendee, argued eloquently for its inclusion, and the suffrage resolution was retained. Exactly 100 of approximately 300 attendees  both men and women, ​signed the document.

The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including featured speaker Mott, as one important step among many others in the continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, while it was viewed by others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men. Stanton considered the Seneca Falls Convention to be the beginning of the women's rights movement, an opinion that was echoed in the History of Woman Suffrage, which Stanton co-wrote.

The convention's Declaration of Sentiments became "the single most important factor in spreading news of the women's rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future", according to Judith Wellman, a historian of the convention. By the time of the National Women's Rights Convention of 1851, the issue of women's right to vote had become a central tenet of the United States women's rights movement. These conventions became annual events until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.


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July 18, 1872 – The Ballot Act 1872 in the United Kingdom introduced the requirement that parliamentary and local government elections be held by secret ballot.

7/18/2021

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PictureThe Polling -- William Hogarth
Contrary to popular belief, the secret ballot has not always been a part of democratic elections in the United States or elsewhere. Although used in some recorded incidents in ancient Greece and Rome, in modern times the secret ballot was not commonly employed until the mid-19th century. 

In early democratic systems, the voting franchise was limited to relatively small number of the nobility and landed gentry.  Being social familiars, the voters often treated elections as a social affair at which an open debate might be held to discuss which of the eligible persons present should be "elected" to serve.  

As the franchise expanded beyond the noble and landed classes, employers and landowners had been able to use their sway over employees and tenants to influence the vote, either by being present themselves or by sending representatives to check on the votes as they were being cast. Small retailers were also concerned not to upset their bigger customers by voting differently from them. 

The painting The Polling (1755) by William Hogarth depicts a typical election before the introduction of the secret ballot.  The colored flags presented the two parties and voters gathered by the flag of their party and announced their vote by calling out  their name and the name of the party (not the candidate) they supporting which was then recorded  in a register.  Note the carriage in the background on the left, indicating that the local squire is observing how his tenants vote.

​The first use of a secret ballot was in France in 1848, and subsequently in Australia, where the adoption of four requirements for the manner of voting in secret became known as the "Australian ballot system."  The requirements were:
  1. an official ballot being printed at public expense,
  2. on which the names of the nominated candidates of all parties and all proposals appear,
  3. being distributed only at the polling place and
  4. being marked in secret.
Later allowances were made for absentee voting by the disabled and those unable to attend the balloting due to service in the armed forces. Massachusetts adopted the first state-wide Australian ballot system in the United States, written by reformer Richard Henry Dana III, in 1888. Consequently, it is also known as the "Massachusetts ballot."  South Carolina was the last state to implement all four of the requirements in 1950.

The Ballot Act 1872 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced the requirement for parliamentary and local government elections in the United Kingdom to be held by secret ballot.  Radicals, such as the Chartists, had long campaigned for the system to end by the introduction of a secret ballot.
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The Representation of the People Act 1867, or Second Reform Act, enfranchised the skilled working class in borough constituencies, and it was felt that their economic circumstances would cause such voters to be particularly susceptible to bribery, intimidation or blackmail. The radical John Bright expressed concerns that tenants would face the threat of eviction if they voted against the wishes of their landlord. It fell to Edward Aldam Leatham, the husband of Bright's sister, to introduce the Ballot Act on leave.

Many in the Establishment had opposed the introduction of a secret ballot. They felt that pressure from patrons on tenants was legitimate and that a secret ballot was simply unmanly and cowardly. Lord Russell voiced his opposition to the creation of a culture of secrecy in elections, which he believed should be public affairs. He saw it as 'an obvious prelude from household to universal suffrage'.

Election spending at the time was unlimited, and many voters would take bribes from both sides. While the secret ballot might have had some effect in reducing corruption in British politics, the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act 1883 formalized the position and is seen by many to have been the key legislation in the attempts to end electoral corruption.

The secret ballot mandated by the Act was first used on 15 August 1872 to re-elect Hugh Childers as MP for Pontefract in a ministerial by-election, following his appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The original ballot box, sealed in wax with a liquorice stamp, is held at Pontefract museum.[11] Of those who voted, 16%, were illiterate, and special arrangements had to be made to record their previously-open oral votes. The first general election using a secret ballot was in 1874, which saw the first Conservative majority elected since 1841.

The Ballot Act 1872 was of particular importance in Ireland, as it enabled tenants to vote against the landlord class in parliamentary elections. The principal result of the Act was seen in the general election of 1880, which marked the end of a landlord interest in both Ireland and Great Britain.

The Act inspired Belgian minister Jules Malou to implement a similar system in Belgium, which he did with the act of 9 July 1877 (la loi du 9 Juillet 1877 sur le secret du vote et les fraudes électorales). The elections of 1878 were a victory for the Liberal Party.

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July 16, 1790 -- President Washington signs that Residency Act establishing the authority to create a federal district as the seat of the National Capital along the Potomac River

7/17/2021

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The Residence Act of 1790, officially titled An Act for establishing the temporary and permanent seat of the Government of the United States (1 Stat. 130), is a United States federal statute adopted during the second session of the First United States Congress and signed into law by President George Washington on July 16, 1790. The Act provides for a national capital and permanent seat of government to be established at a site along the Potomac River and empowered President Washington to appoint commissioners to oversee the project. It also set a deadline of December 1800 for the capital to be ready, and designated Philadelphia as the nation's temporary capital while the new seat of government was being built. At the time, the federal government was operating out of New York City.

Congress passed the Residence Act as part of the Compromise of 1790 brokered among James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Madison and Jefferson favored a southerly site for the capital on the Potomac River, but they lacked a majority to pass the measure through Congress. Meanwhile, Hamilton was pushing for Congress to pass the Assumption Bill, to allow the Federal government to assume debts accumulated by the states during the American Revolutionary War. With the compromise, Hamilton was able to muster support from the New York State congressional delegation for the Potomac site, while four delegates (all from districts bordering the Potomac) switched from opposition to support for the Assumption Bill.

The name 'Residency Act" refers to the place where the government of the United States would reside. The need for a special district for the national capital was recognized in 1783 when a group of demobilized soldiers attempted to press their claims for wages owed by surrounding the seat of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.  Despite requests from Congress, the Pennsylvania state government declined to call out its militia to deal with the unruly mob, and so Congress was forced to adjourn to New Jersey abruptly. This led to the widespread belief that Congress needed control over the national capital. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 43, "Without it, not only the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings interrupted with impunity; but a dependence of the members of the general government on the State comprehending the seat of the government, for protection in the exercise of their duty, might bring on the national councils an imputation of awe or influence, equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members of the Confederacy." This belief resulted in the creation of a national capital, separate from any state, by the Constitution's District Clause.

Ironically, by authorizing the creation of the separate federal district that was not a part of any state, the Residency Act deprived the residents of the territory selected for the District of Columbia from have representatives in Congress, as the Constitution provides only for representative to be drawn from the states.  A movement to amend the Constitution to allow the District of Columbia to have congressional representation has thus far not met with success. 


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June 4, 1919 – Women's rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.

6/3/2021

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The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits the United States and the states from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, in effect recognizing the right of women to a vote. The amendment was the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage in the United States, at both the state and national levels, and was part of the worldwide movement towards women's suffrage and part of the wider women's rights movement. The first women's suffrage amendment was introduced in Congress in 1878. However, a suffrage amendment did not pass the House of Representatives until May 21, 1919, which was quickly followed by the Senate, on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification, achieving the requisite 36 ratifications to secure adoption, and thereby go into effect, on August 18, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was certified on August 26, 1920.

Contrary to a widely held belief, the 19th Amendment was not universally supported by women in the United States.  Moreover, there was a significant amount of support for extending suffrage to women within the male population.  Another misconception is that women were denied the vote at the time of the formation of the United States, which in fact women could vote in many elections on the local and state level in the colonies and in the early days of the Republic.  Likewise, many states had already extended the voting franchise to women for local, state, and even national elections before the passage and ratification of the amendment. 

In fact, only seven states --  Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama -- did not have any form of women's suffrage at the time the Amendment became law.  Western States had been among the first to extend full suffrage to women, whereas New York and Michigan were the only states east of the Mississippi River to have done so.

Mississippi was the last state to ratify the Amendment (among those existing at the time of its proposal) on March 22, 1984

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May 5, 1882 -- Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester, England

5/5/2021

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Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was an English campaigner for the suffrage and suffragette movement, a socialist and later a prominent left communist and activist in the cause of anti-fascism and the international auxiliary language movement.  Her parents were ​Richard Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst, who both later became founding members of the Independent Labour Party and were much concerned with women's rights.

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April 30, 1937 -- Philippine Women's Suffrage

4/30/2021

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The National Assembly in the Philippines announced the plebiscite in 1937, which would decide whether or not women should gain the right to vote. Multiple women's movement started during 1910 which led to the plebiscite in 1937 where women voted for or against for women's suffrage rights. Filipino women worked hard to mobilize and fight for women's suffrage in the early 1900s and on April 30 gained victory after 447,725 out of 500,000 votes affirmed to having women's right to vote.  

In 1939, two years after Philippine women were granted the right to vote, the first woman senator was elected: Geronima T. Pecson. ​The Philippines is one of the earliest countries in South East Asia to have a female president, Corazon Aquino, who was in office from 25 February 1986 to 30 June 1992; the country also has high percentages of women participation in the political realm,

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