08/19/2026
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On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.
By the summer of 1920, thirty-five of the forty-eight states had ratified the amendment, with thirty-six needed for it to pass. Eight states had rejected it, and three others refused even to consider it. That left as a possible 36th only North Carolina — where defeat was all but certain — and Tennessee, which had extended presidential voting rights to women in a bitterly contested battle the previous year.
On August 18, the suffrage measure moved to a vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives. By the time they got to 24-year-old Harry Burn, the youngest member of the legislature, they were two votes shy of the required majority.
Burn represented a strenuously anti-suffrage rural district, but that morning, a page had handed him a letter from his mother, in which she asked him to "be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt," referencing suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt.
To the astonishment of all, Harry Burn voted "aye", bringing the tally dead even. At the last possible moment, Representative Banks Turner, professed opponent of ratification, announced he wished to be recorded as having voted "aye."
A rush wire from Nashville with the news soon reached a waiting Alice Paul, who hastily stitched the long-awaited 36th star to the flag she used to track ratification in the states. Eight days later, the 19th Amendment was certified, enfranchising 26 million women of voting age.
📸: Alice Paul, national chairman of the Woman's Party, unfurling the ratification banner from suffrage headquarters, Washington, DC, August 18, 1920. (Library of Congress)
