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The Centennial Celebration of Woman’s Suffrage Begins

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The following is a guest post by Colleen Shogan, the Assistant Deputy Librarian of Collections and Services at the Library of Congress. She is also the Library’s designee on the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. The Library of Congress opens its newest exhibition, Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote, on Tuesday, June 4, 2019. This exhibition will tell the story of the long campaign for women’s suffrage–considered the largest reform movement in American history–which lasted more than seven decades.

 

WOMAN SUFFRAGE PICKET PARADE, by Harris & Ewing, photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/hec.10340

One hundred years ago today, the nineteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, which removed legal barriers for women exercising the right to vote, received the required two-thirds vote in Congress to advance the proposed language to the state ratification stage. The political path to congressional passage was protracted and circuitous. The longest-lasting social movement in the United States, the woman’s suffrage movement spanned eight decades of American history. How did suffragists finally achieve a pivotal milestone on June 4, 1919?

Congress first considered the notion of female suffrage on January 23, 1866, when James Brooks (D-NY) asked why women had been excluded from the Fourteenth Amendment. After Brooks’ arguments failed to gain robust congressional support, the word “male” was inserted into the text of the amendment as a requirement for citizenship. Elizabeth Cady Stanton