08/28/2026
A history lesson for today.
It's August 26, 1920. In Washington D.C., the final state ratification of the 19th Amendment has just been certified. The telegram arrives at the National Woman Suffrage Association headquarters. Women are crying. Some are laughing. All of them are thinking of the decades behind them.
This wasn't a gift. It was a battlefield.
For over 70 years, American women had been fighting for the right to cast a ballot. They had marched. They had organized. They had petitioned. And they had been ignored, mocked, and criminalized for it.
Then came the suffragists who refused to be silent anymore.
In 1913, women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. The crowd turned violent. Police did nothing to stop it. Alice Paul, one of the march organizers, was beaten. She kept marching.
In 1917, while American men fought in World War I, women picketed the White House with signs asking a simple question: "Mr. President, what will you do for women's suffrage?" They were arrested. Lots of them. They were thrown into the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. The guards there beat them. The women went on hunger strikes. When they refused to eat, the guards force-fed them through tubes shoved down their throats. The pain was excruciating. They endured it anyway.
One of those women was Lucy Burns, a red-haired activist from Brooklyn. She was arrested 17 times for her suffrage work. Seventeen times. In one instance, guards twisted her arms so violently they left bruises that lasted weeks. She never stopped.
The war ended in 1918. America had asked women to work in factories, to organize on the home front, to do everything a citizen should do. But they still couldn't vote.
Finally, in 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment. It read 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 s*x."
Then came the waiting. The amendment had to be ratified by 36 states. Each state vote was a battle. Some voted yes quickly. Others fought it hard. Tennessee was the final state needed. On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee House of Representatives held the vote. It came down to one representative: a 24-year-old named Harry Burn.
He had received a letter from his mother two days earlier. She wrote: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Thomas Catt with her 'Votes for Women' campaign." His mother was asking him to do the right thing. He did.
Harry Burn voted yes. Tennessee ratified the amendment 49 to 47.
Eight days later, August 26, 1920, the Secretary of State certified it. Women could vote. Not because men decided to be generous. Because women fought. Because they bled. Because they sat in prison cells and refused to break.
That November, millions of American women voted in a presidential election for the first time in United States history.
Every woman who voted in 2020, 2024, or any year since, carries that August 26 inside her. The women who marched. The women who bled. The women who looked into the faces of men beating them and did not flinch.
