Women Get the Vote!

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (certified 26 August 1920)

Those darn women! Always wanting things. Like the right to vote. Here's the text of the amendment that finally extended the franchise to women:*

1. 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.
2. Congress shall have power to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation.

Passed by the House of Representatives on 21 May 1919 and by the Senate on 4 June 1919, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve it. 

Alice Paul, 1920,
raising a glass (of juice) in victory

The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was certified on 26 August 1920.

Just over two months later, on 8 November 1920, some eight million American women voted in the first national elections for which they were eligible to vote. 

(It took more than sixty years for the rest of the states to pass the Nineteenth Amendment--Mississippi didn't get around to ratifying that pesky amendment until 22 March 1984. Go, Mississippi!)

Of course extending the franchise to women by amending the constitution did not go unchallenged--for the Supreme Court case Leser v. Garnett (1922), unanimously upholding the constitutionality of the Nineteenth Amendment, click here.

And here's a bonus note for the day: on the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, on 26 August 1970, women across America conducted a Women's Strike for Equality. Here are a few images from the march in New York City, headed by Betty Friedan:

Betty Friedan at the march

I hope somebody's planning a kick-ass celebration for 26 August 2020!!

*If you consider the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 as the start of the women's suffrage movement, it took more than seventy years for women to achieve this goal. If you missed them, here are posts for the first and second days of the Convention. And if you ever wondered what happened to the Equal Rights Amendment, click here.

Update, August 2019: And the centennial begins! Check out Jennifer Schluesser's "The Complex History of the Women's Suffrage Movement." The New York Times piece notes three exhibitions on the subject of women's suffrage that complicate and expand the discussion of the movement. Schluesser's piece contains links to exhibitions opening at the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress and the National Archives (all in Washington, D.C.).

Update, 26 August 2020: Well, because of the pandemic there were no kick-ass celebrations. At least there was a PBS documentary.  And a postage stamp. For more, click here.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer: Theoretical Physicist, Nobel-Prize Winner

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (born 28 June 1906)

In 1963, Maria Goeppert-Mayer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics--just the second woman to win this award, after Marie Curie (in 1903).

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, 1963

Educated at the University of Göttingen, Maria Goeppert studied mathematics but became interested in physics; she completed a Ph.D. in physics in 1930. In the same year she married Joseph Mayer, an American student studying in Göttingen as a Rockefeller Fellow and moved with him to the United States.

Her academic biography is an interesting study in the career limits for a woman at the time. She received a "very modest assistantship" at Johns Hopkins, where her husband landed a job as a faculty member; she did have access to lab facilities and, after some time, was able to offer "some lecture courses."

She briefly returned to Göttingen, during the summers of 1931, 1932, and 1933 to continue work with the German physicist Max Born, but that work ended once the Nazis came to power. 

After her husband left Johns Hopkins (he was fired--Mayer attributed his termination to a dean's misogyny, believing that the dean didn't like having Maria Goeppert-Mayer in the lab), she followed him to Columbia, where again he held a faculty position and where she had a position that was "even more tenuous" than the one she had had at Johns Hopkins. She got an office, but "no appointment."

In 1941, she was offered her first real academic job, a half-time position, teaching science, at Sarah Lawrence College. She taught there, "on an occasional basis," throughout the war. She also taught part-time for Columbia. Although she briefly worked for the Manhattan Project in 1945, after the war, when her husband took up a position at the University of Chicago, she was offered another "voluntary" position. (Her "voluntary" work included "lecturing to classes, serving on committees, directing thesis students, and participating in the activities at the Institute for Nuclear Studies.")

A part-time job at the Argonne National Laboratory, beginning in 1946, led to the work on the nuclear shell model for which she won the Nobel. In 1960 she was finally offered a regular faculty appointment, one that recognized her as a professor "in her own right," at the University of California at San Diego.

She died in San Diego on 20 February 1972.

While I generally love the insight, information, and supporting material found at the Nobel web site, the biography of Maria Goeppert-Mayer posted there makes me gag. (About the situation at Johns Hopkins, for example, you'll find this: "This was the time of the depression, and no university would think of employing the wife of a professor. But she kept working, just for the fun of doing physics.") But you can read her Nobel lecture, watch a video clip of her receiving the award, and access a photo gallery at the Nobel site by clicking here. 

A much better biographical essay is at the American Physical Society website. A longer piece, from which I've quoted here, is a "biographical memoir" written by Goeppert-Mayer's student, Robert G. Sachs, for the National Academy of Sciences. There is a biography, Joseph P. Ferry's Maria Goeppert Mayer: Physicist. But I don't know whether to laugh or cry that the only biography of the second woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Physics is a children's book.

And, as you consider the obstacle to employment Goeppert-Mayer had to negotiate, consider that she won her Nobel the very year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.

Battling Bella

Bella Abzug (died 31 March 1998)

A 1971 photo of Bella Abzug
in one of her trademark hats

Political activist, critical voice in the second-wave feminist movement, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and notable hat-wearer, Bella Abzug is the woman who memorably stated, in her 1970 political campaign, "This woman's place is in the House—the House of Representatives."

Born in 1920, the same year women in the U.S. finally achieved the right to vote, Abzug dedicated her life to social and political activism. Asked about why she always wore a hat, Abzug once explained, "I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee."

If you want to get a sense of Bella Abzug, check out the short video, "Bella Abzug: In Her Own Words." There are lots of great books, but you might start with this one, an oral history edited by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom: Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

Some Memorable, Prescient, and Important Abzug Quotations

• I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.
• Maybe we weren't at the Last Supper, but we're certainly going to be at the next one.
• They used to give us a day--it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.
• The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
• Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.
• Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
• We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it.
• I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.
• If we get a government that reflects more of what this country is really about, we can turn the century--and the economy--around.
• Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.
• I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.
• The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.
• All of the men on my staff can type.
• I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.
• The inside operation of Congress -- the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building -- is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

From the left, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisolm (speaking),
Gracia Molina de Pick, Betty Friedan, and LaDonna Harris

Update, 17 March 2026: The PBS American Masters series premiered a new episode about Bella Abzug, "Bella! This Woman's Place Is in the House." It's an excellent profile and begins with a fascinating account from early in her career. After her first term, in which she defeated a long-time incumbent for  her district, Abzug was "redistricted" out of her seat in 1972--asked whether she was "axed" because she was  "outspoken and relentless," she replied that it was because she was a woman who refused to believe that women should be "invisible in government." As she points out, if she allowed herself to be eliminated, there would only be eleven women among the 435 members of the House of Representatives. 

Also, a wonderful cameo of Maxine Waters, who says, "I was bold because of Bella." And it's fun to see Abzug sparring with George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA, in a Congressional hearing. Guess who's squirming?

For more information, click here. The American Masters site includes biographical information, an analysis of the importance of her career for women who came after her, and several video features, including one with Lily Tomlin, who campaigned for Abzug. 

Although, while watching this, I find myself in despair and inspired . . . 

Betty Friedan, the "Feminine Mystique," and the "Problem That Has No Name"

Betty Friedan (born 4 February 1921)

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that is widely regarded as having ignited the second-wave feminist movement. She went on to help found the National Organization for Women.

Betty Friedan in 1995

In a perfect circle, Friedan was born on 4 February in 1921 and died on her eighty-fifth birthday, 4 February 2006. 

There are biographies, of course, and endless histories, assessments, and analyses. (This New York Times obituary gives a good summary of her life and work.

But there's also the book itself--it's a breathtaking read, available in paper and hardback copies, new and used, fancy fiftieth-anniversary deluxe editions and Norton Critical texts prepared for classroom use, digital download and audiobook. Get one! Read it! Enjoy! And then get angry!

Update, 4 February 2021: Noting the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, the New York Times has published "Why We Can't Stop Talking about Betty Friedan": "A 100th birthday celebration in honor of the feminist raises the question: What was Ms. Friedan’s legacy exactly? ‘As with everything Betty, it’s complicated.’" 

 

Cover of the 1963 edition