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Nineteenth Amendment Ratification Essay

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Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment The Women’s Suffrage Movement reached a peak at the 1917 protest, known as the Silent Sentinels. On January 10, 1917, the National Woman’s party led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns determined to get the right of women’s suffrage by protesting right outside the White House gates (Frost & Cullen-DuPont, 1992, p. 315). These women held up signs demanding that the president allow women the right to vote and stayed outside the gates of the White House for six days. They were later arrested for obstruction of a sidewalk and were taken to court for sentencing. “Found guilty, Alice Paul and 96 other suffragists served sentences up to six months” (Frost & Cullen-DuPont, 1992, p. 315). They were sent to a correctional …show more content…

It was passed within Congress; however, for the amendment to be added into the Constitution, all the states had to ratify the suffrage amendment. This posed as a new challenge for the suffragists. One by one, the states started voting to ratify the suffrage amendment in order for it to be officially added to the Constitution, Tennessee being the last state in August 18, 1920 (Anderson, 2013, p. 56). After a struggle of 70 years of hard work, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920. President Wilson wrote after officially adding the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, “I deem it one of the greatest honors of my life that this great event so stoutly fought for, for so many years, should have occurred during my administration. Nothing has given me more pleasure than the privilege of doing what I could to hasten the day when the womanhood of the nation would be recognized on the equal footing it deserves” (Monroe, 1998, p. 78). Women now had the official and legal right to vote in the United States. In the 1920 presidential election, more than 8 million women across every precinct in the United States went to the polls to exercise their right to vote (Anderson, 2013, p. 57). Although women had now gained the right to vote, they still had only completed the first step to achieving equal

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