“Failure is impossible”: the 72-year fight that ended on one vote in Tennessee

On August 18, 1920, in a stiflingly hot Nashville, the Tennessee House of Representatives had to decide whether to ratify the 19th Amendment. Thirty-five states had approved it, and one more was needed. The Tennessee Senate had already approved it. The House appeared to be split 48 to 48, and a young legislator everyone took for an opponent, a 24-year-old first-term member from a conservative district who was running for reelection that fall, was about to cast the deciding vote.

Harry T. Burn voted aye. He had told nobody that earlier that morning he had received a letter from his mother urging him to support ratification, and he had it in his pocket. His vote changed the Constitution and gave women across the country the right to vote. Later he was called a traitor to manhood's honor, and he answered that he considered suffrage a right and felt a moral obligation to support it. He also said, more lightly, that a mother's advice is always the safest for a boy to follow.

How the fight began

The 72-year campaign started at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton pushed to put the vote on the agenda of the first women's rights convention. At the time women had few legal rights. A married woman had no legal identity apart from her husband. In most states she could not own property, sign legal documents, serve on a jury, testify in court, attend most colleges or keep custody of her children in a divorce, and her wages often belonged to her husband or father. Many of these limits were loosening by mid-century, with married women's property laws spreading, factory jobs open to young women, and more than 20 post-secondary schools for women by 1850. But women still could not vote. Stanton considered suffrage the most important of the injustices, since with the vote women could change the other laws.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton with Susan B. Anthony. Library of Congress.

Two leaders, and a split

The movement gained momentum in May 1851, when Stanton met Susan B. Anthony. They balanced each other, Stanton as the thinker and Anthony as the organizer; Stanton said she forged the thunderbolts and Anthony fired them. Suffragists, many of them also abolitionists, paused their efforts during the Civil War. Afterward the American Equal Rights Association argued over the 14th and 15th Amendments and whether suffrage should be universal or go first to African American men. Stanton and Anthony opposed the 15th Amendment, saying it was wrong not because it enfranchised Black men but because it did not enfranchise all women. The dispute split the movement in two: one group kept working for women's votes, while another backed African American male suffrage, with the promise that women's would follow.

In 1878 a California senator introduced an amendment written by Stanton and Anthony saying that the right to vote could not be denied or abridged on account of sex. It was defeated. Women's voting came first through territorial and state laws, and by the end of the nineteenth century only four states had granted it fully: Wyoming (1869), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896) and Idaho (1896).

Stanton died in 1902. Four years later, at a celebration of her 86th birthday in Washington, D.C., Anthony ended her last formal statement on suffrage with the words "Failure is impossible!" She died in 1906.

The Silent Sentinels

A newer generation took over in the early twentieth century with parades and public protests. On January 10, 1917, twelve women held the first pickets outside the White House, standing silently with banners asking how long women must wait for liberty.

Silent Sentinels picketing in front of the White House. Library of Congress.

President Woodrow Wilson first found them a curiosity and invited them in for tea, which they declined. As they returned day after day, and after the United States entered the war in April 1917, he found them an annoyance and embarrassment. The first women were arrested in June, charged with obstructing traffic, and became more defiant. Sentences lengthened and treatment worsened. By October Alice Paul and other imprisoned women had begun a hunger strike and were violently force-fed, and Paul was moved to a psychiatric ward and denied a lawyer. The episode became a public relations nightmare, and by late November the prisoners were released.

In January 1918 Wilson urged Congress to support suffrage as a war measure. The next day, exactly a year after the first pickets, the House passed the amendment, but the Senate did not. On June 4, 1919, the 19th Amendment finally passed both houses, and it went to the states, three-fourths of which had to ratify it. By spring 1920, thirty-five of the thirty-six needed had done so, and attention turned to Tennessee.

Sources

• National Park Service, "“Failure is Impossible!” The Battle for the Ballot" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-failure-is-impossible-the-battle-for-the-ballot.htm), by Winifred Conkling, author of Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot, first published on March 10, 2020 on the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission's blog; the commission's logo and a family photograph are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.