100 year anniversary of 19th Amendment’s ratification

There is no democracy without enfranchisement of all its citizens, and without the vote, there is no voice. [The voiceless are made helpless, vulnerable to depression and dissociation, and/or resentment and revenge.] The 19th Amendment enfranchised women, the right to vote giving voice to the speechless. [Psychotherapy strives to give voice, to enfranchise the speechless, empower the voiceless, to bring to fruition an individual’s potential.] This 100th anniversary is bittersweet; joy for the hard fought victory, anger that disenfranchisement lasted so long. [Our patients, too, may lament that it took so long to arrive at our offices where they work together with us to arrive at a stronger sense of themselves.] 

Woodrow Wilson had declared, “Liberty is the fundamental demand of the human spirit.” The suffragists he initially opposed replied-- with their daily picketing outside the White House,

led by Alice Paul--, “How long must women wait for liberty?” These women, demonstrating in nonviolent civil disobedience through the winter and into the fall of 1917, were jeered, called Bolsheviks by journalists, physically assaulted, attacked, arrested, jailed and beaten, [much like Black Lives Matter demonstrators are today]. When it became politically expedient, and after years of persuasion (the carrot) from the then president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Carrie Chapman Catt, along with many months of embarrassment (the stick) by Paul and her sister demonstrators about his hypocrisy of America’s so called democracy with half its citizens unable vote, Wilson supported in November 1917 New York’s amendment to its state constitution for women’s full suffrage.

The Resolution for Amendment 19 came before the U.S. House of Representatives, gaining the required two thirds majority, and passing on May 21, 1919. One Representative left his wife’s death bed to, at her behest, vote ‘aye’ and then returned home to her funeral. The U.S. Senate passed it on June 4, 1919 by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority. Three-quarters of the states were needed to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution (in 1920, that was 36 out of the then 48 states).  All the southern states failed to pass, some would not even consider, the 19th amendment--black women voting would lessen their hold on white supremacy-- making ratification impossible, all except for Tennessee (its governor was a friend of Wilson’s). Tennessee was the necessary 36th state to approve, by one vote over the needed two-thirds majority, the 19th Amendment. After over 70 years* of activism, twenty million women finally won the vote, thanks, in part, to a mother who told her Tennessee State Representative son he’d better vote for women’s suffrage. The ratification of the 19th Amendment was a huge step toward realizing the United States’ potential.

*First Convention for Woman’s Rights held in 1848, in Seneca Falls, NY -- with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglas in attendance. Black women’s suffrage groups had the motto “Lifting as we climb.”

The 19th amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”