A century ago women won the right to vote

The year 2020 marks one remarkable anniversary for the nation. It was 100 years ago that women won the right to vote nationally in the United States with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Women winning the right to vote was the result of many years of hard work by individuals as well as such organizations as the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association.

For many years, there had been quiet calls for women to gain the vote and have rights guaranteed. Abigail Adams wrote a famous letter to her husband John Adams at the Continental Congress in 1776, imploring him to "remember the ladies" as Congress considered independence from Great Britain and weighed the defense of the liberties of men.

Women actually received the right to vote first in New Jersey in 1776, but it was an oversight. The state's new constitution shortly after independence gave the right to vote to any resident who owned property and did not specify men only. Some women met the property-owning requirement (which was not unusual in the years before universal suffrage) but saw their right to vote stripped away in 1806.

The Seneca Falls Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, called for all women to be given equal rights with men, but it took decades to overcome political obstacles and social conventions that kept women out of the election process. Women would not be able to vote anywhere in the nation until the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote in 1869.

While the occasional Arkansan remained sympathetic to the idea, no organized attempts to gain the right to vote for women existed in the state until the 1880s. In 1881, Eliza Fyler, an attorney, organized the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association in Eureka Springs. While the group attracted several members, it collapsed when Fyler died in 1885. Clara McDiarmid organized another version of the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association in Little Rock in 1888 that also folded quickly.

Anti-suffragists hurled a bizarre array of arguments against women voting, including suggestions that wives would cancel out the votes of their husbands or that women voting would cause them to abandon their families.

Nevertheless, as the 20th century began, a new generation of activists were gaining the vote for women throughout the West, proving that women in politics strengthened society rather than weakened it.

In Arkansas, the AWSA was resurrected along with the Political Equality League in the early 1910s.

With the election of Charles Brough as governor in 1916, suffragists found a powerful ally. Brough recognized the increasingly prominent role women were taking in promoting social issues, regardless of their inability to vote and supported giving them the vote. On March 7, 1917, the state legislature approved the right to vote for women. Brough stated that it would be "a mighty factor in the educational, social, and moral amelioration of our state."

Support for women voting was lukewarm, however. Arkansas women would have the right to vote, but it would only be in primary elections. But Arkansas was a one-party state in 1917, which meant that the winner of the Democratic Primary almost automatically won the general election anyway.

Four other states would grant women the right to vote that year in some capacity. More than 30 states still had not given women the right to vote, and it would still be three more years before enough states ratified the suffrage amendment to give women the right to vote nationwide.

Texas would also give women the right to vote only in primary elections in 1918, making Arkansas and Texas the only two states to grant women the vote in this way.

In the House of Representatives in May 1919, and with the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, congressmen voted 304-89 in favor of the constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote, with the Arkansas delegation unanimous in its support of women's suffrage.

On June 1, the Senate approved by 56-25. The two Arkansas Senators, Joseph T. Robinson and William Kirby both voted in favor. Now passing Congress, states quickly took up the issue amid a storm of protest from anti-suffragists. Thirty-six out of 48 states were required for ratification. The Arkansas legislature ratified the amendment on July 28, barely seven weeks after it was sent to the states. Tennessee became the last state needed for ratification on Aug. 18, 1920, approved by a margin of one vote. Of the old Confederate states, only Arkansas, Texas and Tennessee approved the amendment. The 19th Amendment was ratified just in time for women to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Today, women easily make up half the voting population of Arkansas and have served in a variety of offices, including both houses of Congress, the legislature, city councils and as mayors.

Where women were once denied the right to vote, in many Arkansas communities it is now women who are responsible for registering voters and running elections.