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100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment: Unpacking the Legacy

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100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment: Unpacking the Legacy

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Teen Vogue

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To mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, The Uncounted is a series that elevates the stories of women of color who have been disenfranchised and often written out of history.

Editor's note: Participants in this shoot followed the CDC's recommended guidelines for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. We hope it offers you some solace or escape in this trying time. Currently, our whole team is social distancing as we work from home. We sincerely hope, if you are able, you are too.

The footage is unforgettable. Crowds of people were gathered outside the glass doors of the Kentucky Exposition Center in the summer heat, banging on the locked glass doors, chanting, "Let us in!" As the 6 p.m. deadline approached for the state's 2020 primary election, voters at the only polling site in Louisville demanded that they be heard.

That is what the history of voting access has looked like in the United States. It is a story of people marching, testifying, shouting, waging court battles, and suffering physical violence to secure the full civic participation they deserve.

August 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment - the largest expansion of the franchise in the country's history. It is a celebrated milestone in the United States's story of suffrage and equal rights for women. But in practice, that historic document largely granted voting rights only to those who were white and well-off. Sexism, immigration bans, and a patchwork of other discriminatory state laws barred Native, Black, Asian, and Latinx women from voting well into the 20th century.

Even now, many Americans of all gender identities remain unrepresented. Those with disabilities are often ignored by lawmakers and face physical barriers in casting ballots. Millions of immigrants living in the U.S. with green cards or without papers are deprived of a voice. Many Americans with felony records are disenfranchised. Native voters living on reservations or in rural villages are blocked from the ballot by nonstandard addresses, ID problems, and mail delays. Puerto Ricans who live on the island can't participate in federal elections. Daunting lines at college campus polling sites force frustrated students away, and 16-year-olds on the front lines of social movements are deemed too young to cast ballots. So many others - due to a lack of information or time, language barriers, or suffocating voter suppression laws and tactics - are prevented from exercising this most fundamental of rights, and they are all part of a decades-long struggle to carve out a place in our imperfect democracy.

And yet. Despite these daunting circumstances, would-be voters have spent decades banging on those glass doors. Teen Vogue spoke to some inspiring women who are currently advocating for other people to have the right to vote, even though they wouldn't have been granted that right 100 years ago.

Writer and activist Raquel Willis, actor Jessica Marie Garcia, Puerto Rican feminist blogger Aliana Margarita Bigio Alcoba, actor Leah Lewis, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition's Tiniesha Johnson, Representative Ayanna Pressley, Native Alaskan student activist Charitie Ropati, actor and activist Yara Shahidi, New York City Council candidate Shahana Hanif, and Black Lives Matter activist Thandiwe Abdullah weighed in on what voter suppression has looked like in their communities, why voting must be accompanied by vigorous on-the-ground organizing, and the complex meanings of this anniversary.

These are some of the stories of the uncounted.
Editor's note: These conversations have been edited for clarity and significantly condensed.
Raquel Willis, activist, writer, and media strategist

It's hard to have a completely positive conversation about voting. I think the people who think there's a celebration on the horizon are often privileged white women who are well-to-do and not concerned with the fact that so many other folks are still struggling to have their voices heard.

I was referring [specifically] to the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment being passed. But I do think there's often a mini-celebration that happens at each election, and it's often visualized in all the "I voted" stickers that are put on the headstones of suffragettes who we laud in feminist history. But to me, I can't look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony as heroes; they were white supremacists, and the worst kind of white supremacists who were aware of and in conversation with Black folks and abolitionists, like Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, and still turned their backs on the fight for more access for Black Americans. So this idea of limited liberation is not the kind of feminism I celebrate. And I think, just as we are having conversations about dismantling the structures erected to honor the Confederacy, we need to be having a real conversation about who we celebrate in feminist history.

I am going to vote because I believe that harm reduction does still matter, but I do understand why there are people who put more energy into other ways of organizing and transforming our country. Electoral power is just one type of power that we have and can aspire to in this country. I'm more interested in a holistic conversation that focuses on a variety of ways people can organize and impact change. I have to call into account a lot of our politicians; I think about former president Barack Obama. I think we have a lot of folks who have a lot of power and a lot of platform who put all this energy into telling people to vote, but mum's the word for all the other action that is happening. How many of them are continuously encouraging the folks who are doing direct action on the ground and protesting? How many of them are routinely highlighting the work of community organizers?

Jessica Marie Garcia, actor

The 15th and 19th Amendments were really just saying what states can't do - they can't discriminate based on race and gender - but states found other ways to discriminate against Latinos and, really, all people of color. It's 100 years later and we still see a laundry list of ways that Black and brown voters are being suppressed.

We see that in voter ID laws, which hit Latinos particularly hard.... There [are] voter purges. There [are] voter registration restrictions, which can be cutting back use of mobile early voting, curbed voter registration drives. There's felony disenfranchisement, which makes it harder to restore voting rights to people with past criminal convictions. There's harassment at the polls.

I think it's really easy as minorities and as women in this country to believe that our voice doesn't count. We get reminded of this time and time again, by the way we're depicted in the media to wages to health care. But it's important to remember that women are the sh*t, and we vote at higher rates than men, across all racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

I think we should always feel good about how far we have come, but never forget how far we still have to go. Right now, there are countless people across America and the world who are fighting for their freedom. It's mirroring exactly what was happening 100 years ago today. So it's hard to celebrate when the only thing that's really changed is the year.

Aliana Bigio Alcoba, founder of feminist blog Con(Sentimiento)

Puerto Rico is one of the oldest colonies in the world. I think that what affects us the most is that a lot of people don't really know that, and if they do, they don't know how little control we have over it.

Every time Democrats bring us up it's for election purposes; it's not to talk about how the fiscal control board is literally ruining every possibility our island has to move on and prosper economically and socially. It's never about the complicated and embarrassing things.... We're kind of like a shame, like something you hide in the closet and don't want to talk about.

So I think when we talk about voting rights, it's very difficult for me to get on the same bandwagon of "Vote! Register to vote so everything will change!" because it has never been like that for us.

We've been at this for forever. We were Spain's colony, and then we were just passed to the U.S., so we've never known freedom. We were always taught the discourse of freedom, to repeat it like we actually live it, but we don't. Going back to the beginnings of the 19th Amendment in the U.S., when it passed, they didn't even think about the women here in Puerto Rico who were not able to vote. We had to have our own suffrage movement, and it wasn't until 1935 that all women could vote here. So that's a 15-year delay. It had to be women who were from here - Ana Roque de Duprey, Luisa Capetillo, Juana Colón - who had to figure it out and talk about, "Hey, we're literally owned by the U.S., we're a colony of the U.S., they already did this for their women, why can't we have the same?"

Leah Lewis, actor

Given the fact that I grew up in a mixed household where I was an Asian adoptee and my parents were Caucasian, they never really talked about the history of discrimination that Chinese and other Asian Americans have been through. That's something that kind of gets brushed over in school too. When I actually discovered some of this information, it was so shocking.... This country used Chinese Americans to build the railroads, and then the Chinese weren't even allowed to show up to the ceremony when the railroads opened. That alone gives me chills.

The moment Asian Americans arrived here, they were met with "we appreciate your participation and work, but we're not going to credit you for your participation." Even though that happened over 100 years ago, that pain still exists in Asian communities. Asian American voices have been muted in our society for so long.

Unfortunately, I kind of feel like the past ends up integrating previous prejudice into present-day life. When people are silenced for so long in someone's country that they call home, it can be very, very easy to dissociate from political opinion. It doesn't feel like you're part of the outcome.

To me, voting means having a voice, which is kind of what we're all fighting for right now. I would tell Asian American teens, specifically, that the generation they live in is one of the strongest, loudest, and most passionate ones. They can be a part of that, and are a part of that.

Tiniesha Johnson, chapter and membership coordinator at Florida Rights Restoration Coalition

I was 28 when I lost my right to vote. I had committed a crime, and in the state of Pennsylvania, once you go to jail or prison, you lose your right to vote while you're doing your time. But as soon as you come home, those rights are reinstated. So I went to vote and, lo and behold, my name was definitely on the voter registration rolls. I took my kids with me because I want my kids to see, "Hey, my mom, she votes, she participates in the political arena." I'm trying to build a culture in my family that voting matters.

I moved down to Florida in June 2017, and my aunt tried to get me involved [with the Florida Rights and Restoration Coalition]. I guess you could say I really didn't care at that time. I was in a shelter and my number-one priority was trying to find a house for my kids, for us to get out of the shelter. But I realized this issue is really important to me as a returning citizen, and because my brother is currently incarcerated.... So I was like, "I have to do this work, and I have to do it with a passion because it affects me, it affects my brother," and I'm fighting to make sure that my kids don't have to go through anything like what I went through.

What I hear when I ask people if they're registered is, "Oh, I don't believe in voting. I don't want to vote for the president anyway." So I have to break it down and say it's not just about the presidential race; it's about local races too. If you have children, you vote for the school board.... I think some people are starting to be woke about it, but there are still a lot of people who are not educated about voting rights and civil rights. Period.

I always say, "If you don't use your vote, you're still using your vote." Not voting is voting. If you don't get out there and vote for your community, you're actually saying a lot. You're saying you don't care about your community and the dollars that could come into it to help people.

If you are able to register to vote, use your voice; don't let anyone tell you you cannot vote. It is a right that was given to us, and don't let anyone take that from you.

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)

There still tends to be this false narrative that people are apathetic, that Black voters are apathetic, when, in fact, they've been the preservers of democracy for as long as we've had the right to cast a ballot - which we had to fight, organize, and mobilize for; we were not just given it. And today, Black women are the most reliable voting constituency for the Democratic Party. So we have been the table shakers, we have been the architects of movements, we have been the foot soldiers, we have been the truth tellers, we have been the preservers of democracy.

I don't think that they would work so hard to disenfranchise us if we were not powerful. I don't think they'd work so hard to obstruct our ability to cast a ballot if we were not powerful. Indeed, we are powerful and resilient and determined, even in the midst of all our trauma.

This is one of the reasons I introduced the amendment to HR1 to lower the voting age to 16 in federal elections.... We need to be cultivating and perpetuating that relationship as early as possible. There were so many stories about parents who brought their children to vote who were casting their vote for the first time. Imagine that being your first experience: Waiting on line for six hours in inclement weather, people locking the door, when all you're trying to do is make your voice heard. And yet, and still, we rise.

If you want to be a coalition and a movement builder, if you want to be an activist, look at the early days of the civil rights movement - which we're still in. People always talk about it as some sort of bookend, especially when they're telling the evolution of the experience for Black Americans. They'll have you thinking that Rosa sat, and Medgar died, and Martin gave a speech, and John Lewis crossed a bridge, and suddenly we had freedom. That does not acknowledge the many defeats along the way. Also, in elevating those most iconic luminaries, there were millions more who sent up a prayer, who packed a lunch, who wrote a strategic plan, who marched, who are nameless and faceless to us. But their role in history is undeniable. If you look at the early days of the movement, the Freedom Rides were seven months, the Greensboro sit-ins were six months, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was 382 days. So if you have only recently begun to raise your fist, to lift your sign, to march for the Black Lives Matter movement, know that you are just honoring a long tradition of activism borne out of that earlier movement. So it isn't a matter of should I vote, or should I march, or should I lobby; it isn't a matter of or - it's and.

This is that reckoning moment we're at as a country, so in that sense it's very apropos that we're holding space for the best of who we are while acknowledging the worst of who we've been. We are finally telling the truth about the face of that amendment and the women of color who contributed to it - who were abandoned by it. I feel encouraged because we're not whitewashing that history.

Charitie Ropati, Columbia University student and advocate for Native rights

I personally get offended when people tell me, "Charitie, voting is the answer. If you just vote, all these issues will be solved." But voting can't address 400 years of genocide. Voting can't address 400 years of colonialism. And voting isn't harm reduction, point-blank. You cannot ask Indigenous communities, Black communities, [and] victims of sexual assault to choose between two white men who have not only harmed their communities but have also been accused of sexual assault to choose between the lesser of two evils - this idea of who is more evil than the other... Voting can't address the 400 years of historical trauma that our people have been through. That's what people have to understand.

In terms of the reservation system, a lot of Native American people can't register to vote because you have to have an address, but [many] reservations don't have formal addresses. When it comes to the census, you have a lot of the issues we face with underreporting.

And when it comes to these colonial holidays and anniversaries that serve white women and white men, I'm reminded of how this country is obsessed with Native American culture but doesn't care for those who came before. You can see it in how we're affected by COVID-19, in how we see all these deaths on Apache and Navajo reservations and how people don't care, how we literally have to reach out to foreign countries to get help. So it's a reminder that we're still here, and that's powerful. We're still smiling, we're still laughing, we have some of the strongest languages. I'm able to go back home to my village to fish and be with my grandmother and my cousins. [But this anniversary is] a reminder that this country still continues to serve white audiences.

Yara Shahidi, actor and civil rights activist

I remember vividly when I was in speech and debate, as the nerd that I am, we were debating voter ID laws. The one thing somebody had said to me was, "Well, we can't give felons, for example, the right to vote because they'll vote for things in their favor, like better prison food." [This] was not only a baffling and mind-blowingly ignorant example, but it also spoke to the ways and the lack of empathy in which we have the conversation on blatant voter disenfranchisement. For some reason, when we talk about ensuring that people have the right to vote, there's this automatic assumption made that somebody has done something to lose the right. It's indicative of a time past when [financial and literacy] tests stood between Black people and the polls, and a faulty outlook at best.

If we are to be a democratic republic, then people should have the right.

As evident in the months of protests, in the months of civil unrest and action, there are many ways to hold our systems accountable. I do think, though, it is of the utmost importance that we use voting as yet another avenue. It works in conjunction with the civic action happening around the world. I am proud to come from a generation that cares deeply about so much and so many people; it feels like a mark of Gen Z that our community is ever-expansive.... We understand that policy is personal and that we must pay attention to the topics that seemingly "don't relate" to us. If you have the right to vote, the opportunity that is granted to you is to carry with you to the polls all the people who you care about; to carry with you all the people who are indeed underrepresented.

Instead of being a one-platform voter, everything that we care about, from climate change to police reform, etcetera, are often on our ballot. Not to say that the solutions that we are being offered are perfect by any means, but I think it is a step forward. [It] is extremely important to know that the more engaged and informed voters are, the more we can ease the work of the people who are underrepresented. I turn to this last primary, for example, and I know one of the personal reasons I was voting was the fact that Reform L.A. Jails had a measure [on the ballot].

It is [also] of the utmost importance to take our particular perspective to the polls. I know many people have said it prior to me, but I think, to quote Patrisse Cullors, "When you invest in Black freedom, we all are free." And I think the same exists for really young Black women, young, nonbinary people, the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality and ethnicity, race, etcetera, is that when the most theoretically vulnerable populations are helping to guide policy, the rest of the world is a freer place because of it. So I do think that our voices should be leading the charge in terms of making this world a more equitable place.

Shahana Hanif, organizer and New York City Council candidate

A big part of my run is not just to shine a light on what's missing within the electoral politics of New York City, but a great effort to expand who votes and who participates. In my case, Bangladeshis within my community are seeing for the first time what it means for me to run, and how the issues that we're grappling with as a community are all political.

Historically, when elections happen, candidates - and even candidates who won and have gone on to represent us - don't reach out to us. They're not coming out to learn about or hear from low-propensity voters, especially in a community where many people are undocumented. I think candidates focus on "Who will vote for me?" rather than "Who is the community on the ground, and what can I do to uplift their issues as a legislator?"

I registered on campus at Brooklyn College, and it was sort of a passerby moment, where some young people were doing voter registration and I happened to pass by. But it shouldn't be that way. I think the conversation about our political parties, and addressing why voting matters, and why the votes of women of color and working-class people matter - normal, routine voter registration efforts don't address that. But of course they don't, because the history of voting is rooted in leaving us out. It's no secret that the history of voting tells a long tale of racism and misogyny. Who had the right to vote first? Men, and they were white men. For the rest of us to vote, it took organizing, it took power mapping, it took an uprising to demand it, and then to make it real.

Making it so difficult for voters with disabilities to get to the polling site is still an issue we're fighting [against]. COVID-19 made [mail-in ballots] a mainstream topic, while many disabled folks have long been getting their vote out by mailing them in. But we know what we saw in this moment when absentee ballots didn't get to folks on time. There isn't a clean, streamlined process to reach voters with disabilities. We continue to disenfranchise voters - especially voters of color, voters with disabilities - every election cycle. Despite advocating for and organizing for early voting and automatic voter registration - reforms that would make this process easier - it is a long-haul fight. That fight is connected to all the other parts of electoral politics that have for decades kept us out.

Thandiwe Abdullah, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard

In my household, I was taught that women's suffrage was inspired by the slavery abolitionist movement. I think that history is not just forgotten, but purposely erased. We act as if marginalized groups work independently - as if there is no overlap - when in reality, these movements and identities are very complex and nuanced. Black women exist, and continuing to ignore the contributions they made to the suffragist movement is not only erasure, it also upholds white supremacist beliefs that only certain voices (white voices) deserve to be heard and revered.

I think this [anniversary] gives us the opportunity to critically think about who certain laws serve, who they exclude, and ways to truly make the voting process equitable.

Anyone who has paid attention to history knows that change has never come easy. People took to the streets. They marched, rioted, and petitioned to have the right to vote. I think the answer will be in the revolution. Change requires anger, will, and drive.

Voting was never about hearing voices like ours - I tell [that to] every Black girl who is interested in voting. Voting has never historically been our answer. We didn't vote our way out of slavery or segregation; however, our ancestors went to extreme lengths and dedicated their life's work to giving us the freedoms we have now, and we need to honor them by using our power at the polls. I also say that as young people, we have a duty to get others to vote. I'm a 16-year-old girl; unfortunately, that means I am unable to influence my community at the polls. Does it seem fair? No, but I know that means I have to work 10 times harder to get everyone I know who can vote to the polls.
CREDITS:
Photographers: Tory Rust and Kai Byrd

Art Director: Emily Zirimis

Stylist: Tahirah Hairston

Fashion: Everybody World Recycled Cotton Trash Tee, $39, Phenomenal Voter Sweatshirt, $55, participants' own pants and jewelry

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The Women the 19th Amendment Left Behind

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To mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, The Uncounted is a series that elevates the stories of women of color who have been disenfranchised and often written out of history. Editor's note: Participants in this shoot followed the CDC's recommended guidelines for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic .

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Podcast

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"Men their rights and nothing more;
women their rights and nothing less."

Written by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's rights activists used this rallying cry to demand voting equality. But the suffrage movement included far more voices and perspectives than these two well-known names: throughout the fight for women's right to vote, generations of diverse activists demanded full access to the ballot box. Hosts Rosario Dawson and Retta guide us through this seven-part series from the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and PRX, bringing us the stories we didn't learn in our history books.

And Nothing Less is the official podcast commemorating 100 years of the 19th Amendment and women's constitutional right to vote.

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And Nothing Less Podcast - Women's History (U.S. National Park Service)

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Written by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's rights activists used this rallying cry to demand voting equality. But the suffrage movement included far more voices and perspectives than these two well-known names: throughout the fight for women's right to vote, generations of diverse activists demanded full access to the ballot box.

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Podcast

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The Magic Sash is a journey back in time hosted by gold medal gymnast and advocate Aly Raisman. Join Lotty and Isaiah, two very modern fifth graders, as they meet iconic heroes of the movement for women's right to vote and experience big moments in women's suffrage first-hand. They'll learn that what women (and men) fought for - women's full political equality - isn't dusty history at all.

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The Magic Sash Podcast - Women's History (U.S. National Park Service)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Magic Sash is a journey back in time hosted by gold medal gymnast and advocate Aly Raisman. Join Lotty and Isaiah, two very modern fifth graders, as they meet iconic heroes of the movement for women's right to vote and experience big moments in women's suffrage first-hand.

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The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement

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The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement

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New York Times

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As the 19th Amendment turns 100, three exhibitions in Washington explore the contentious - and unfinished - struggle for voting rights.

A 1915 illustration by Henry Mayer, titled "The Awakening," suggested the geographical force behind the suffrage movement. Credit... Cornell University, The PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography

WASHINGTON - In the summer of 1919, shortly after Congress passed the 19th Amendment, the Smithsonian acquired a few relics from the nearly century-long struggle for women's suffrage.

Susan B. Anthony's red silk shawl and the table on which Elizabeth Cady Stanton had drafted the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 were among the donated items. A year later, after the amendment was ratified by the states and became part of the Constitution, they were put on view along with some documents, teacups, brooches and other objects in a modest display bearing the offhand title "An Important Epoch in American History."

Today, there's a bit more excitement. The yearlong centennial of the 19th Amendment is being commemorated with exhibitions, parades, conferences and new historical markers across the country, many timed to various states' ratifications of the amendment. And in Washington, three major exhibitions are now open at the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

Together, these shows - all curated by women - make up one of the richest explorations of women's history yet assembled in the capital, or anywhere else. But they also offer a lesson in the messiness, complexities and compromises involved in any movement for social change - and the fraught politics of historical memory itself.

For years, the drive for women's suffrage was presented mainly as the story of middle-class white women and iconic national leaders like Anthony and Stanton. That story began with the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York in 1848 and ended with the triumphant adoption of the amendment on Aug. 26, 1920, which resulted in the single largest extension of democratic voting rights in American history.

But in recent decades scholars have taken a less top-down view, emphasizing the movement's multiple starting points and patchwork progress through hundreds of state and local campaigns. They have also excavated the role of African-American women, who were largely excluded from the major, white-led suffrage organizations and marginalized in the early histories of the movement, if they were mentioned at all.

Even before the centennial year began, there have been tensions over who and what to celebrate - or even how to sum up the amendment's significance.

Did it grant the vote to women? Not exactly. Before 1920, 15 states, mainly in the West, already had full female suffrage, while others granted women partial voting rights.

And after the amendment, which declared only that states could not discriminate in voting based on sex, millions of women of color were still barred from the polls. Most African-American women in the South, like African-American men, were blocked by poll taxes, literacy tests and other racial barriers, while Native Americans and Asian immigrants were largely excluded from citizenship entirely.

"It's important to remember how piecemeal a struggle it was," said Robyn Muncy, a historian at the University of Maryland, and one of the curators of the National Archives exhibition. "Seeing change as coming in one fell swoop undermines us as citizens, and gives us a false idea about the way change happens."

The three exhibitions each aim to cover the whole story, but with subtly different emphases and timelines.

"Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote," at the Library of Congress through September 2020, emphasizes the movement's core narrative, from its beginnings in abolitionism to the campaigns of the 1910s, when suffragists became the first Americans to regularly protest outside the White House.

On view are items relating to key leaders, from Anthony's annotated personal copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" to the notebook in which Carrie Chapman Catt, Anthony's successor as president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, tracked the amendment's state-by-state ratification in 1919-1920.

But the show also traces how the fight for suffrage became a mass movement in the early 20th century, advocated and advertised via sheet music, tote bags, buttons, souvenir fans, even suffrage cookbooks.

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Suffragists protesting at the White House in 1918. The National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress and the National Archives have exhibitions that look at the struggle. Credit... National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency

"That was one of the more fun things to research," Janice Ruth, the lead curator, said in an interview. "It revealed their cleverness, astuteness and doggedness, along with the desire and need to raise money."

Stories of African-American women and other women of color are woven into the narrative at the library. But the desire to tell a more inclusive story is front and center in "Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence," at the National Portrait Gallery until Jan. 5, 2020.

The exhibition is a sprawling consideration of more than a century of history, but its core is an assemblage of portraits of nearly 60 named women's rights activists, a third of whom are women of color. To assemble the group, the gallery had to reach beyond its own collections, which are disproportionately white and male. (It's a bias the gallery is trying to counter with a policy requiring that half of all new acquisitions diversify the collection in some way.)

Small portraits of Anthony and Stanton are in a central case in the main gallery, along with a portrait of Sojourner Truth. Yet equal weight is given to the lesser-known women lining the walls, like the African-American poet and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who at an 1866 meeting of the National Women's Rights Convention, rose to challenge Stanton and Anthony, who later opposed the 15th Amendment, which enfranchised black men but omitted women.

A portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, circa 1870. Credit... National Woman's Party Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

"I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life," Harper declared.

This exhibition, part of the Smithsonian's American Women's History Initiative, emphasizes that it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to make the promise of the 19th Amendment a reality for African-American women.

That law "is the true conclusion," said Kate Lemay, the exhibition's curator. "You can't think of women's rights and say, 'The 19th Amendment, the end!'"

The piecemeal, partial progress of women's suffrage history is also emphasized in "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," at the National Archives through Jan. 3, 2021. It's embodied vividly in one of the odder items on view: 1910 patent drawings for a Rube Goldberg-like voting booth with separate entrances for men and women, which displayed different ballots according to which entrance was used, so that women in states with partial suffrage could only vote in certain contests.

The exhibition, which Dr. Muncy curated with Corinne Porter, a National Archives curator,makes clear how that earlier voting by women mattered politically, giving steam to the movement. As women gained votes in more states, support for the 19th Amendment grew in Congress.

Grand Marshal Jane Walker Burleson (center, on horseback) leading a suffrage march on March 13, 1913, in Washington. Credit... Bain News Service; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

But the show does not neglect fractures within the movement. A wall mural about the 1913 Women's Suffrage Parade, sometimes called the first peaceful march on Washington, relates how the journalist and suffrage advocate Ida B. Wells famously defied the organizers' demand that black women march in the back.

And it also highlights figures like Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a Chippewa law student who marched in the Washington parade, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant who as a teenager helped lead a 1912 suffrage parade in New York on horseback, despite being ineligible for citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Act. (The act was repealed in 1943.)

Like the others, the National Archive show covers some little-known chapters in suffrage history, such as the case of Puerto Rico, which, as a territory, was not covered by the 19th Amendment. Its government remained free to discriminate on the basis of sex, which it did, waiting until 1929 to enfranchise literate women - and until 1935 for all women.

A campaign poster for Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress. Credit... Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives

Each show cites different starting points for the suffrage movement, which has been a source of debate among scholars. They also have different solutions to an even more fraught problem, given today's polarized political climate: how to end?

The Library of Congress show concludes with a six-minute video showing clips of a carefully bipartisan selection of female political "firsts," including Shirley Chisholm (the first African-American woman in Congress), Geraldine Ferraro (first female vice-presidential candidate) and Sarah Palin (first female Republican vice-presidential nominee).

The portrait gallery takes a more citizen's-eye view, ending with a portrait of the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, opposite a QR code that lets visitors to connect via smartphone to online information about voter registration.

At the National Archives, the curators push the farthest into the present, touching on issues about access and equality that remain raw and unsettled today.

There is discussion of the 1975 amendment to the Voting Rights Act requiring that ballots be offered in languages other than English. And there's a displayhighlighting Ruth Bader Ginsburg's scathing dissent in the 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated central portions of the act.

Dr. Muncy said it was important to see the 19th Amendment not as a triumphant culmination, but one landmark in a struggle for equal rights for all citizens that isn't over yet.

"Today, there are actions both to expand and to limit the franchise at the state level everywhere," she said. "That is part of the story of women's suffrage too."
Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Through September 2020 at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Avenue, SE, Washington; 202-707-5000, loc.gov.
Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence
Through Jan. 5, 2020, at the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F Streets, NW, Washington; 202-633-8300, npg.si.edu.
Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote
Through Jan. 3, 2021, at the National Archives Museum, 701 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington; 202-357-5000, museum.archives.gov.

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The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement (Published 2019)

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As the 19th Amendment turns 100, three exhibitions in Washington explore the contentious - and unfinished - struggle for voting rights. WASHINGTON - In the summer of 1919, shortly after Congress passed the 19th Amendment, the Smithsonian acquired a few relics from the nearly century-long struggle for women's suffrage. Susan B.

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The Surprising Role of Sports in Women's Suffrage

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The Surprising Role of Sports in Women's Suffrage

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By the time she was 53, Frances Willard had a long list of accomplishments to her name. As president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the influential educator had published popular books, traveled across the country lecturing, and served as the first female president of a college that granted degrees to women. But there were two things she couldn't do that she wanted to add to her résumé: vote, and ride a bicycle.

Those may seem like vastly different pursuits, but they came to be intertwined in a way that often gets overlooked. As it turns out, sports and the athletes who participated in them played a bigger role in suffrage than you might expect.

"We haven't always made this obvious connection between women's right to sport and physical activity and their broader spectrum of civil, social, political rights, but there is a connection - there's a political dimension to who has access to sport and who doesn't and why," says Jaime Schultz, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at Penn State University and author of Women's Sports: What Everyone Needs to Know. "The same rationales that held women back from education and political life were used against them in sport, so they really go hand in hand."

The 1890s ushered in the safety bicycle, now easier and less dangerous to ride than its predecessors. With its two equal-size wheels, chain drive with pedals at the axle, functional brakes, and pneumatic tires that provided a smooth ride, the safety bicycle rippled through society like a crashing wave, washing over communities of all kinds. Suddenly, women could travel on their own, without a chaperone. Out of necessity, they started dressing in a less-restrictive fashion; higher hemlines and bloomers became popular. They were getting a taste of freedom and an entrée into citizenship; they began to view themselves as having the right and responsibility to advocate for things like better roads. Why shouldn't they get to cast a ballot too?

"That sense of women seeing themselves in a whole new role in the world is very tied into bicycling," says Ellen Gruber Garvey, an English professor at New Jersey City University. "They were having experiences outside of the narrow, domestic sphere. There was a new dimension to life that riding brought."

It's worth noting that the women who were granted these new freedoms, like the women who would eventually win the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, were predominantly white. Despite their decades of advocacy for suffrage, many women of color remained disenfranchised by state laws and voter suppression tactics that kept them from actually casting a ballot. They also faced racism and discrimination from some white suffrage leaders, who forced them to march separately and excluded them from suffragist conventions.

As for Willard, she passed away before the 19th Amendment was ratified, but she did learn to ride a bike, spending three months working at it. She wrote a book about the process and encouraged other women to pick up the hobby, knowing that it would open more doors than just ease of transportation. "I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning-wheel we must all learn to ride," Willard wrote.

Cycling was far from the only physical activity with connections to suffrage. Women hosted swimming competitions to bring attention to the cause; in 1917, the National Women's Life-Saving League staged a race to rescue a dummy who was wearing an anti-suffrage sash. (The winner admitted she would have preferred to drown the dummy.) There were also "suffrage hikes" for publicity purposes. These pilgrimages involved walking long distances over multiple days, including a tough 225-mile route from Newark, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C., completed by 13 women in 16 days.

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Sports Played a Surprising Role in Women's Suffrage

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By the time she was 53, Frances Willard had a long list of accomplishments to her name. As president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the influential educator had published popular books, traveled across the country lecturing, and served as the first female president of a college that granted degrees to women.

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This History of the Color White and Women's Suffrage Movement

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This History of the Color White and Women's Suffrage Movement

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To mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, is a series that elevates the stories of women of color who have been disenfranchised and often written out of history.

Fashion has and always will be political. Throughout history, dress has always been used as a symbol of power, wealth, and status. Beyond that, the ways in which we dress can tie us to political and social movements, from the black berets worn by the Black Panthers to MAGA caps worn by Trump supporters today. This rings true for the women's suffrage movement, a decades-long fight for the right to vote for women in the United States.

A lingering symbol of the movement is white clothing. Yet it was just one of the colors used by the Suffrage Movement. Following a 1908 rally in London's Hyde Park that attracted over 300,000 protesters wearing white, the visual impact of having a dress code became evident. Supporters had been encouraged to wear white dresses with tricolour sashes. Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a suffragette and key member of the Women's Social and Political Union, which The Telegraph notes was the leading force behind the suffrage movement, is recognized as instituting three official colors in 1908: purple, white, and golden yellow.

Case Western Reserve University history professor Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, PhD told T een Vogue that these colors were chosen to symbolize loyalty, purity, and hope. "Purple is loyalty, loyalty to the cause, white is purity, and yellow is hope," she says. In the United States, white, purple and gold were the official colors of the National Women's Party, according to The New York Times. They also were specifically selected as colors women might already have in their wardrobe, allowing more supporters to have access to the movement. With 20th century fashion also becoming more comfortable, the movement incorporated narrower skirts and less undergarments, says Rabinovitch-Fox.

Rabinovitch-Fox explains that the women leading the suffragist movement were very media savvy. "Not only for their time but, I think, even for our time," she says. Off the back of previous fashion choices associated with feminism ending in mockery, such as the bloomer, she says the movement realized that gaining the right to vote would require building a new more appealing image of what it means to advocate for women's rights. Glenda Tinnin, one of the organizers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, said, "An idea that is driven home to the mind through the eye, produces a more striking and lasting impression than any that goes through the ear."

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The History of the Color White and Women's Suffrage Movement

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To mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, is a series that elevates the stories of women of color who have been disenfranchised and often written out of history. Fashion has and always will be political. Throughout history, dress has always been used as a symbol of power, wealth, and status.