Women's Right to Vote: the 19th Amendment
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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The Nineteenth Amendment was the final success of the Progressive Era and came into effect in time to vote in the election of 1920, which ushered in twelve years of conservative Republican control of the White House. Not only were there no further legislative successes for progressives, the Supreme Court in the 1920`s began to rule against progressive legislation on the books. By an ironic twist, in the decision on Adkins v. Children`s Hospital in 1923, Justice Sutherland, writing for the majority, remarked that:
In view of the great -- not to say revolutionary -- changes which have taken place since that utterance [the Muller case], in the contractual, political, and civil status of women, culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment, it is not unreasonable to say that these differences have now come almost, if not quite, to the vanishing point.
Passed June 4, 1919. Ratified August 18, 1920.