The 19th Amendment: 90 years old today

Nineteenth Amendment
Passed by Congress June 4, 1919.
Ratified August 18, 1920. [It became national law eight days later.]

Section 1: 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.

Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

That means that in a country whose Constitution is 223 years old, women only gained the right to vote 90 years ago. It took 133 years from the ratification of the our Constitution to give half the population a say in how the government is run (and that was a difficult, violent fight at times, and one that had its own deep racist prejudices).

And don’t forget, black women didn’t really secure their right to vote throughout this country until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That Act was only 45 years ago, two generation’s worth of time.  For black women, it took 178 years to get the right to vote.