In 1890 the two rival American organizations finally merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Stanton and then Anthony as president. Anthony, speaking in 1906 weeks before her death, told a convention that "failure is impossible." She was right in the end, but it took another fourteen years and a new generation with new methods.

The state road and the federal road

The federal amendment Anthony had championed was first introduced in Congress in 1878, and its wording never changed: "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." Because of its origin it was called the Anthony Amendment. For decades it went nowhere, so suffragists fought state by state. Victories came slowly and mostly in the West: Washington in 1910, California in 1911, then several more by 1914. Each new state added members of Congress who answered to women voters.

In 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, a superb organizer, became NAWSA president for the second time. In 1916 she presented her "Winning Plan," which coordinated state campaigns and the push for a federal amendment at the same time, with strict discipline over which states to fight in and when. In 1917 New York, the most populous state, approved women's suffrage, a major turning point.

Alice Paul and the militants

A younger activist, Alice Paul, had worked with the Pankhursts in Britain and been jailed and force-fed there. Back home she and Lucy Burns organized a great suffrage parade in Washington on 3 March 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. Hostile crowds attacked the marchers while police stood by, and the outrage brought the cause national attention. The parade also exposed the movement's racism: organizers asked Black women to march at the back, and the journalist Ida B. Wells refused, joining her Illinois delegation along the route.

Paul's group became the National Woman's Party in 1916. Borrowing a British tactic, it held the party in power responsible, campaigning against Democrats in states where women already voted, because the Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. From January 1917 its members, the Silent Sentinels, picketed the White House six days a week, the first group ever to do so. After the United States entered the First World War, their banners quoted Wilson's own words about fighting for democracy abroad. Many were arrested for obstructing traffic and sent to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where they were beaten and force-fed, and news of their treatment shocked the public.

Victory

Catt's NAWSA, by contrast, supported the war effort, and its leaders argued that women's war service had earned the vote. In September 1918 Wilson went to the Senate and endorsed the amendment as a war measure, calling it vital to winning the war. The Senate still fell short. In June 1919 the new Congress passed the amendment, and it went to the states, three quarters of which, 36 of 48, had to ratify. On 18 August 1920 Tennessee became the 36th state, and the Nineteenth Amendment was certified on 26 August.

Who still could not vote

The amendment banned discrimination by sex, but it left every other barrier in place. In the South, poll taxes, literacy tests and violence still kept most Black women, like Black men, from voting. Some white suffrage leaders had even argued to Southern legislators that white women's votes would outnumber Black votes, a strategy that traded justice for expediency. Many Native American women were not citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and some states kept them from voting long after. Asian immigrant women could not become citizens at all under the naturalization laws of the day. For millions of American women, 1920 was a promise, not a ballot.

The organized opposition deserves mention too. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, founded in 1911 and led at first by Josephine Dodge, argued that most women did not want the vote and that politics would draw women away from charitable work. Its members were mostly women.

Worked example: the letter in Harry Burn's pocket

By August 1920 the Tennessee Senate had ratified, and everything depended on the House in Nashville. Anti-suffragists wore red roses and supporters wore yellow ones. Harry Burn, a 24-year-old Republican and the youngest member, wore red, and he had voted with the opponents on an early motion that ended in a tie. But in his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb Burn, who had followed the debate from home. "Hurrah and vote for suffrage," she wrote, "and don't keep them in doubt." When the roll was called on ratification, Burn voted yes, breaking the deadlock.

The next day he explained that he knew a mother's advice was always safest, and that he believed in full suffrage as a right. The story is often told as a happy accident, but it rests on decades of work: Febb Burn was the kind of voter a movement had spent seventy years persuading, one household at a time.