The Nineteenth Amendment secured women’s voting rights nationwide in 1920.
The amendment states that the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. Congress approved it in 1919, and the necessary thirty-sixth state ratification came from Tennessee on August 18, 1920. It was formally certified on August 26.
The amendment followed decades of organizing, protests, legal campaigns, and state-level victories. Leaders and activists included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells, Carrie Chapman Catt, Alice Paul, and many others. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 helped make women’s suffrage a central national reform demand.
The amendment did not instantly remove every barrier to voting. Many African American women, Native American women, Asian American women, and Latina women still faced discriminatory laws, intimidation, citizenship restrictions, or administrative obstacles. Later civil-rights legislation was essential to enforcing voting rights more broadly.
The Nineteenth Amendment is sometimes called the “women’s suffrage amendment,” but its legal wording prohibits sex-based denial of voting rights rather than using that shorter phrase.