19th Amendment
Nineteenth Amendment
Ratified August 18, 1920
Verbatim
Exact text as ratified.
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.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Plain English
A translation that drops archaic words but keeps the meaning, including the parts courts still argue about.
The right of U.S. citizens to vote cannot be denied or limited by the federal government or by any state because of sex.
Congress has the power to enforce this amendment by passing appropriate laws.
What this means for you
The Nineteenth Amendment prohibits the federal government and the states from denying voting rights based on sex. It guarantees voting rights for women on the same terms as men.
The amendment was the result of a roughly 70-year campaign for women's suffrage that began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. It applies to all citizens regardless of sex and is enforced by Congress through general voting rights legislation.
The amendment does not address voting rights based on gender identity. Federal courts have not directly resolved how the Nineteenth Amendment applies to transgender voters, though general anti-discrimination protections under other federal laws apply.
About
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, after a ratification campaign that came down to a single vote in the Tennessee state legislature. Tennessee's ratification was the 36th, meeting the three-fourths threshold required.
Before this amendment, voting rights for women were determined state by state. Wyoming had granted women the right to vote in 1869, before becoming a state, and several Western states followed. The Nineteenth Amendment made the right uniform across the country at the federal level.
The amendment did not immediately produce equal participation in voting. Many women, particularly Black women in Southern states, faced the same barriers — poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation — that the Fifteenth Amendment had failed to overcome in practice. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was as important for Black women's voting rights as it was for Black men's.
The Equal Rights Amendment, proposed in 1972, would have added a broader guarantee of equality regardless of sex to the Constitution. It was ratified by 38 states by 2020, but its constitutional status is currently disputed because it was ratified after the deadline Congress originally set.