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1 1 (January 13, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govekfp0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional ______ Research Service The Nineteenth Amendment and Women's Suffrage Part 4: The Progressive Era and Ratification January 13, 2023 This Legal Sidebar is the fourth in a six-part series that discusses the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which recognized women's voting rights. Shortly before Election Day 2022, a group of people gathered in Rochester, New York, to honor the late social reformer and women's rights activist, Susan B. Anthony. About 150 years earlier, Anthony cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election. She was arrested and charged with illegally voting as a woman in violation of federal law. She unsuccessfully claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the right to vote as a privilege of citizenship. A federal district court imposed a fine of $100 on Anthony, but she never paid it. As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of Anthony's vote-and the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification- Congress may be interested in the history and impact of the women's suffrage movement and the Nineteenth Amendment. Additional information on this topic will be published in the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the US Constitution. The Progressive Era, which lasted from the late 1890s to the early 1920s, was a period of increased political activism and social reform in the United States. During this era, the National American Woman Suffrage Association initially emphasized state-level efforts to secure voting rights for women. Article I, Section 2, Clause 1 of the Constitution gave states the ability to determine voter qualifications for congressional elections based on the qualifications required to vote in state elections. By 1916, women had obtained full voting rights in eleven western states and partial voting rights in many others. Nonetheless, the slow pace of progress at the state level spurred activists such as Carrie Chapman Catt to intensify their efforts to obtain an amendment to the Constitution recognizing women's right to vote. Some suffragists, such as Alice Paul, combined traditional advocacy efforts with more radical forms of protest, including parades, picketing, and hunger strikes in support of a federal amendment. The year 1917 marked a turning point in the fight for women's suffrage. In that year, the first woman elected to Congress, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, took office. (Montana had granted women equal suffrage rights in 1914.) In addition, New York passed a referendum approving women's suffrage, becoming the first eastern state to do so. As the United States entered World War I in April 1917 to fight for democracy abroad, it became more difficult for opponents of women's suffrage to argue that Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10899 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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