08/19/2026
From American Experience-PBS: When the 19th Amendment became law in August 1920, 26 million adult female Americans were nominally eligible to vote. But full electoral equality was still decades away for many women of color who counted among that number.
The federal suffrage amendment prohibited discrimination on the basis of s*x, but it did not address other kinds of discrimination that excluded many American women on the basis of gender and race.
🗳️ Although some Black suffragists, mostly in the North, were able to realize the rewards of their activism, voter suppression tactics like literacy tests, poll taxes, voter ID requirements, intimidation, and acts of violence were prevalent throughout the country until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, preventing many Black women from casting their ballots.
🗳️ In 1920, Native Americans weren’t allowed to be United States citizens, so the federal amendment did not give them the right to vote. With the passage of the Snyder Act in 1924, American-born Native women gained citizenship. But until as late as 1962, individual states still prevented them from voting with literacy tests, poll taxes, and claims that residence on a reservation meant one wasn’t also a resident of that state.
🗳️ Native-born Asian Americans already had U.S. citizenship in 1920, but first generation Asian Americans did not. Asian American immigrant women were therefore excluded from voting until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 allowed them to gain citizenship more than three decades after the 19th Amendment.
🗳️ In Puerto Rico, women’s voting rights were first given to literate women in 1929 and all women in 1935. For Spanish-speaking American women, literacy tests remained an effective means of keeping them from voting long after the federal amendment was passed. It took a 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination against language minority citizens, to expand voting access to women who rely heavily on languages other than English.
📸: Three African American women at a polling place in New York City or Newark, New Jersey reviewing a book of registered voters, 1957 (Library of Congress)
