Today marks the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the US constitution, a landmark event in the history of US civil rights that extended the vote to all American women for the first time.

The 19th amendment reads, simply:

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.

The passage of the 19th amendment was the culmination of a decades-long political struggle but, on this day 90 years ago, it was carried thanks to Harry Burn's mother.

Amending the US constitution is a tortuous process, and requires a proposed amendment to be ratified by three-fourths of the individual states. Carrie Chapman Catt, a leader in the US suffragette movement, once estimated that the struggle had required more than 50 referendums, as well as "480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters, 47 campaigns to get constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks, 30 campaigns to get presidential party campaigns to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive congresses."

On 18 August, 1920, the Tennessee state legislature met to consider the amendment, with local politicians subject to heavy lobbying to vote against it from various factions – including those who feared that women's votes would make it impossible to repeal the 18th amendment that prohibited the sale of liquor.



Previously, politicians in eight other states, mainly in the more conservative south, had voted against ratification. Tennessee's house of representatives became the focus of national attention, and the anti-suffragist forces thought they had enough votes to scotch ratification. But then Burn, a young lawyer who had previously backed the anti-suffragist bloc, carefully weighed a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, which read:

Dear Son, ... Hurray and vote for Suffrage and don't keep them in doubt.... I've been waiting to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet.... Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs Catt with her "Rats." Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha! No more from mama this time. With lots of love, Mama.

So Burn switched sides and voted for ratification – and the motion passed, 49-47. Although procedural tricks by the antis tried to sabotage the vote – some legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum while their associates held massive anti-suffrage rallies – formal ratification followed on 24 August. Burn continued to be the brunt of attacks by the anti-suffragists, who alleged that bribery had caused him to switch sides. He responded in a statement:

I want to state that I changed my vote in favor of ratification first because I believe in full suffrage as a right; second, I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify; third, I knew that a mother's advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification; fourth, I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free seventeen million women from political slavery was mine; fifth, I desired that my party in both State and nation might say that it was a republican from the East mountains of Tennessee, the purest Anglo-Saxon section in the world, who made national woman suffrage possible at this date, not for personal glory but for the glory of his party.

The 19th amendment would probably have been ratified a few weeks later, when Connecticut also voted in favour. But other states remained bitterly opposed: Mississippi did not ratify the 19th amendment until 1984.

Burn's statement, referring to Tennessee as "the purest Anglo-Saxon section in the world", hints at the civil rights struggle for African Americans that would follow in the South, an equally long fight that did not finish even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.