A young politician's mother sent him a letter. It changed who could vote in America forever.

The 19th Amendment: Women Win the Right to Vote

Tennessee's deciding vote ends a 72-year struggle for suffrage

On August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, granting women the right to vote in the U.S. — the culmination of a 72-year campaign.

On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee House of Representatives cast the decisive vote for the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited denying the right to vote based on sex. The vote was 49-47. The deciding vote came from Harry Burn, a 24-year-old representative who had been expected to vote against — until he received a letter from his mother that morning telling him to "be a good boy" and vote for ratification.

The 19th Amendment was the culmination of a 72-year campaign that had begun at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others wrote the Declaration of Sentiments demanding women's suffrage. Decades of organizing, petitioning, marching, hunger strikes, and imprisonment by suffragists had preceded this moment.

The victory was incomplete. The 19th Amendment formally enfranchised most women, but Black women in Southern states continued to be systematically disenfranchised through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence for another 45 years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Native American women didn't receive citizenship (and thus voting rights) until 1924.

Yet the amendment's passage transformed American democracy. Women repr…

💡 Harry Burn, whose vote ratified the amendment, kept the letter from his mother his entire life. She told him: 'Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'Rat' in ratification.'