| Bettmann via Getty Images |  | August 26, 1920 | Suffragettes celebrated a major victory 102 years ago today: A proclamation was signed that added the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving some 26 million women voting rights for the first time. When the Founding Fathers were drafting the earliest laws, Abigail Adams encouraged her husband, then-Vice President John Adams, to "remember the ladies" — yet the resulting Constitution omitted the word "women." Seneca Falls, New York, hosted the inaugural women's rights convention in 1848. Three decades later, a women's suffrage amendment was introduced in Congress, and more than 40 more years later a related suffrage bill finally passed in the House and Senate. Afterward, 36 states needed to ratify the amendment for constitutional inclusion. An indecisive 24-year-old, Representative Harry T. Burns, cast the deciding vote, ultimately favoring ratification at the behest of his mother. Puerto Rican women could vote by 1935, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 awarded suffrage to first-generation Asian Americans. However, state-imposed voting obstacles prevented many Indigenous and Black women from casting ballots until the 1960s, and a 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act finally allowed women who are non-native English speakers to go to the polls. August 26 now holds the official designation of Women's Equality Day. | |
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