The National Archives Celebrates the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

/PRNewswire/ -- The following is a document alert -- part of a program sponsored by the National Archives to notify the media of documents in the holdings of the National Archives that are relevant to national holidays, anniversaries or current events. This program is based on original records from the National Archives, its 13 Presidential libraries and 14 regional facilities, and is designed to offer the media an historical perspective on events that occur periodically and to highlight historical antecedents to current political or diplomatic initiatives.


(The following is based on an article that appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of Prologue magazine, the Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration. The text and high resolution images of the 19th Amendment can be found online at: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=63). A petition to Congress for the right to vote, signed by Susan B. Anthony is online at: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/anthony-petition.html

Pieces of History
The 19th Amendment Gives Women the Right to Vote


On a hot August day in 1920, Representative Harry Burn listened as the Tennessee House of Representatives debated an issue that had been simmering since well before the Civil War--woman suffrage.

For generations, long before 24-year-old Burn was born, the woman suffrage movement had as its goal an amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowing women the right to vote.

The movement had begun in 1848 at a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, but it took 30 years to get the amendment introduced in Congress. Action on Capitol Hill was very slow. Until 1914, the Senate voted only once, turning it down, and the House did not vote at all.

Meanwhile, the suffragists took their fights to the states. Through legislative action or state amendment, the movement had some success. In the 1916 election, women could vote for presidential electors in 11 states. By 1920, even without the referendum, women would have been able to vote for presidential electors in 30 states.

Finally, in the spring of 1919, Congress passed the amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. States acted, quickly, and by August 1920, 35 had approved it. In all but one of the remaining states, the amendment had either been rejected or had no hope of being approved.

With one additional state needed, the push for ratification focused on Tennessee. Supporters and opponents of the amendment, the press, and thousands of spectators flocked to Nashville to witness the proceedings. Carrie Chapman Catt, the latest in the long line of woman suffrage leaders that had included Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, was also there.

Tennessee's Senate had already approved it, but after several votes in the House, the issue was deadlocked, 48 to 48. As the debate continued, Burn opened a letter from his mother.

"Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification," mother Burn wrote. Harry had been counted among the opponents, but when the next vote was taken, Harry voted in favor of the amendment, and ratification was approved.

Thus, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, was ratified on August 18, 1920, in time for women in all states to vote for President later that year.

The next day, Harry Burn explained his vote to angry opponents: "I believe in full suffrage as a right. I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification."

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Women Get the Vote 89 Years Ago Today

Women were meeting as early as 1848 to discuss their desire to vote. This amendment, which gave women the right to vote, took many years for the public to accept. It wasn't until after World War I that President Wilson announced his support of women voters.

The bill was proposed in June 1919 and was ratified August 20, 1920.

The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was officially certified on August 26, 1920.

This Constitution Moment was brought to you by the James Waldrop Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution, Fayetteville, GA.

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State’s Statistical Register Goes Online

Curious about how many votes George Busbee received when he ran for governor in 1974? Wondering how many times Mickey Mouse has been written in as a candidate for office? Answers to those questions and a plethora of others are available via computer now that the Georgia Official and Statistical Register is available online. It contains a wealth of information not easily accessible elsewhere for today’s historians.

The register is the main source of election statistics for the state. Its content and length have varied over the years of its publication (1923 -1990), though in general the register has provided information on categories such as:

- state executive offices, boards and commissions

- the state legislature and legislators, including short biographies with photos

- elections

- the state judiciary

- Georgia's federal representation

- the University System of Georgia

- county officers and data

- miscellaneous (e.g. flag, song, state symbols, poets laureate)

The electronic version was digitized by the Digital Library of Georgia from the print volumes, which are available in the UGA main library Georgia government documents collection. Users are able to search across the text of all the volumes (about 28,000 pages). The register can be accessed at http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/statregister.

“The register has become an historical resource of particular interest to genealogists, but it also lists, for example, all the banks, public libraries and newspapers in each county and the poets laureates for the state,” said Susan Tuggle, a reference librarian who coordinates the Georgia government publications site in the Digital Library of Georgia. “It cumulates elected officials so you can see who was in office at a given time.”

Compiled every two years by the Georgia Archives (formerly the Department of Archives and History), it was not a handbook that explained the workings of the state government for the uninitiated, but rather a kind of directory or state of the state with a concentration on the officials who guided it.

Legislator and other official biographies included photos beginning in 1951. The amount of information was reducing starting with the 1979-1980 volume and the projected ended with the 1989-1990 volume.

“I’ve wanted to digitize it for years – it is the biggest project yet in the Georgia Government Publications Program, and it took more than a year to produce because we are offering it in three formats (JPG, PDF and DjVu),” Tuggle said.

Post-1990 information is best obtained from state government web sites and the Georgia Government Publications database at http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/ggp.