Congress passed the women's suffrage amendment

On June 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate approved the Nineteenth Amendment by 56 to 25, just clearing the two-thirds bar. The House had passed it two weeks earlier, on May 21, so the Senate vote sent the measure out of Congress and on to the states for ratification.

The text was a single, stubborn sentence first drafted decades before: the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Generations of suffragists had marched, lobbied, picketed the White House, and gone to jail to get those words this far.

Passage in Congress was only the start; ratification was a state-by-state knife fight.

It took another fourteen months. When Tennessee ratified on August 18, 1920 — reportedly swung by one young legislator heeding his mother’s advice — it became the 36th and decisive state, and the amendment became law.