the 19th amendment: commemorating 100 years
The 19th Amendment: Commemorating 100 Years by Sarah C. Otto
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020 marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. The text of the 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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Achieving this monumental change required a long and difficult struggle, including decades of protests, marches, and lobbying. Suffrage in Kansas Nearly a decade before the ratification of the 19th Amendment, Kansas extended equal voting rights to women. But women’s suffrage had been on the Kansas horizon since the State’s constitutional convention in 1859, where prominent suffragist Clarina Nichols petitioned for equal voting rights. Eight years later, in 1867, the State Impartial Suffrage Association coordinated a voter outreach program to support expanding suffrage to all Kansans “without regard to sex or color.”1 The Association disseminated a circular, which declared “that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The circular noted with sweeping language that with expanded suffrage, “Kansas will be free, and occupy the proudest place, in all time to come, in the history of the world.”
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The Journal of the Kansas Bar Association
Kansas women achieved the first step toward full suffrage in 1887, when the state granted women the right to vote in local elections, if they lived in certain Kansas cities. That year, Susanna Madora Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas – one of the Kansas cities in which women could vote in local elections. Salter, who was only 27 years old at the time, was the first woman elected mayor in the United States. She received an overwhelming two-thirds of the vote and, by all accounts, fulfilled her duties as mayor well. In 1912, after decades of hard work, Kansas became the eighth state in the nation to grant women full suffrage. And even after Kansas women fought for and won the right to vote, they kept pushing for national suffrage. The 19th Amendment Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919. The Amendment was subsequently ratified in 1920. That year, over 8 million women voted in the national election. The centennial of the 19th Amendment provides an opportunity to commemorate 100 years of women’s Constitutional right to vote and to recognize the actions of dedicated suffragists who were integral to the ratification of the Amendment. The suffrage movement relied in part on protests to spread the message of women’s suffrage throughout the country. Although Kansas had extended suffrage to women, Kansas