March is Women's History Month in much of the English-speaking world. This means the patriarchy is currently keeping the eleven other months for itself but hey, baby steps. Ken Jennings, like many Jeopardy! contestants, would be the first to admit he knows nothing about women. But he'll be with us all month correcting some misconceptions about history—or is it herstory?!?—that even the most ardent Women's Studies majors might miss on the final.
The Debunker: Did the Nineteenth Amendment First Give Women the Right to Vote?
In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson stood before the U.S. Senate and urged its members to approve a new constitutional amendment, one that would give women the right to vote. World War I was raging, and women were becoming familiar sights in mills and factories, with so much of the regular male workforce off fighting in Europe. The tide of public opinion on women's suffrage shifted rapidly, in a way that would be familiar to anyone watching the gay marriage debate today. States began to fall like dominoes, and both political parties, eager to stand on the right side of history, embraced the amendment. It was ratified in 1920, just five years after a similar bill couldn't get out of the House and two years after one had failed in the Senate.
Given that sudden sea change in public opinion, it's easy to assume that no American women could vote before the Nineteenth Amendment—which is actually not true! The Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed suffrage to women. In other words, it prevented states from barring women from voting. But by the time it passed, women could already vote in some or all elections in three-quarters of the United States.
Women were actually voting statewide in New Jersey as far back as 1797, though they lost the franchise ten years later when a legislator named John Condict led a charge to repeal the law. (By an amazing coincidence, Condict had nearly lost a close election to a Federalist challenger who was more popular with women voters.) American women didn't vote again in large numbers until 1869, when the Wyoming and Utah Territories granted full suffrage, a full year before the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed black men the right to vote. By 1919, when the states were hotly debating the Nineteenth Amendment, women were already able to vote for 326 of the 531 presidential electors.
The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, on August 26, 1920, was a milestone for women's rights, and the culmination of a campaign that had begun over seventy years earlier, at the Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York. It gave the franchise to millions of women, and expanded it for millions of others. But it's interesting to note that millions of other women had already been voting for years due to a tireless national grass-roots campaign—much as in our time, when marriage equality is finally enshrined nationwide by legislation or (more likely) Supreme Court decision, it will already be the law of the land in most states.
Quick Quiz: There are still two nations in the world where women have no voting rights. One is Saudi Arabia. The other, surprisingly, is in Europe! What country is it?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.