Thread by @amhistorymuseum

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment's ratification. This #WomensHistoryMonth, you'll probably see a sentence like this:

"The 19th Amendment gave U.S. women the right to vote."

However, that sentence erases a lot of women from the history books. A thread:⬇️

The 19th Amendment was the culmination of generations of women advocating for their political rights.

Ratifying the 19th Amendment was neither the beginning nor the end of women's fight for the vote, which stretched back to the American Revolution.

Before the 19th Amendment addressed women’s voting rights nationally, suffragists fought for and secured the right to vote at the state level. The stars on this flag represent the four states where women secured the right to vote before 1900: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho.

The 19th Amendment did not explicitly guarantee women the right to vote in the United States. (To date, no amendment does). Instead, it stipulated that citizens' right to vote could not be "denied or abridged...on account of sex." Many women were still barred from the ballot box.

After the 19th Amendment's ratification, while many women were able to vote for the first time, many other women—especially women of color—were kept from polls through other laws, violence, intimidation, and restrictions like poll taxes, literacy tests, & whites-only primaries.

Many of the women denied the right to vote after the 19th Amendment were the same women who had actively fought for its ratification—including Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin (Métis/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe). A lawyer and activist, she marched in the 1913 suffrage parade in D.C.

Though active in the suffrage movement before the 19th Amendment, many Native American women could not vote until the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). Multiple states prevented Native Americans from voting well into the 20th century.

[📷: Chickasaw woman suffrage handbill, 1910]

The 19th Amendment's benefits did not immediately extend to U.S. territories. Educator Milagros Benet de Mewton was one of many women activists who fought for their voting rights in Puerto Rico, where restrictions on women voting persisted until the 1930s.

[📷: @librarycongress]

@librarycongress A member of the New York Women’s Political Equality League, Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was one of many women of Asian descent who were unable to become naturalized citizens and vote until the repeal of laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

📷: Barnard Archives and Special Collections

@librarycongress African American women in many states did not benefit from the 19th Amendment until the 1960s. Decades of protests, boycotts, and registration campaigns—led by activists like Fannie Lou Hamer—were needed to break down Jim Crow restrictions on voting: s.si.edu/2JMhHmb

@librarycongress Women's fight for vote rights did not end in the 1960s. Many more women were able to participate in elections after 1975, when the Voting Rights Act began requiring states to provide ballots and instructions in multiple languages.

[📷: Poll sign, 2014]

@librarycongress Today, hundreds of thousands of women in the U.S. are unable to vote because of felony convictions. We explore this issue in our "American Democracy" exhibition: s.si.edu/2wd2FAk

@librarycongress This #WomensHistoryMonth, we’ll dig into how women have fought for their rights throughout U.S. history—before and after the 19th Amendment.

Planning a visit? We're opening a new exhibition on March 6 focused on this topic: s.si.edu/icons #BecauseOfHerStory