American women won the constitutional right to vote
On this day · 18 August 1920
One Tennessee lawmaker, swayed by a note from his mother, cast the vote that put women's suffrage into the Constitution.
On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, clearing the three-fourths threshold and writing women’s suffrage into the U.S. Constitution. The amendment’s language is blunt: the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged… on account of sex.”
The deciding moment came in the Tennessee House, where the vote deadlocked until 24-year-old Harry Burn switched sides at the urging of his mother, who had written telling him to “be a good boy” and back ratification.
Victory took decades of lecturing, marching, lobbying, and arrests.
Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby formally certified the amendment on August 26, 1920. The win was real but incomplete: many women of color, especially in the South, would face poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation for decades before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put teeth behind the promise.
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