Resistance After Ratification: Female Disfranchisement after the Nineteenth Amendment

Scholars of woman suffrage have long debated the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment on voter participation, political parties, social movements, and public policy, but they have yet to investigate the actual experiences of women who tried after 1920 to register and vote.  Anti-suffrage sentiment lingered, and in places in which the memory of African American male disfranchisement was fresh, the prospect of women voting generated uncertainty and fear.  So what actually happened when women approached registrars and polling places?

Using local newspapers and the records of field investigators from the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and the U.S. Justice Department, this paper documents the exclusion of substantial numbers of women -- African American, white, Latina, and often poor -- from the polls in the years after the vote had been "won."  It finds that opponents of woman suffrage, motivated by partisanship or by a belief in white and/or male supremacy, used poll taxes, Jim Crow tactics, intimidation, and sexual and other physical violence to block women from the polls.  

This project thus uses the lived experiences of women trying to cast ballots at the grass roots to critically reevaluate scholarly understandings of the Nineteenth Amendment.  It connects the "unfinished business" of the woman suffrage movement to the voting rights movements of the mid-twentieth century.  Finally, it calls for a more nuanced assessment of the period after ratification, one that balances the successes of the Amendment against its failures.