In the months leading up to the 1920 election, American newspapers covered an array of unconventional educational exercises unfolding across the country. These training schemes were among the many campaigns launched to mobilize women voters following the August 18, 1920, ratification of the 19th Amendment, which extended the franchise to (mostly white) women on a federal level.
In many states, particularly in the West, women had already been voting for years, if not decades. Wyoming introduced full women’s suffrage in 1869, partly in order to attract single women to the underpopulated territory, and Utah—hoping to show that Mormon women “were not oppressed by the practice of polygamy,” according to the National Park Service—followed suit shortly thereafter. By 1919, 15 states (only two of which were located east of the Mississippi River) had granted women full voting rights; in other parts of the country, women found themselves barred from voting for president and members of Congress but allowed to vote in school, local or state elections.
No matter how groundbreaking the 19th Amendment was, it failed to stipulate who was responsible for ensuring that this new voting bloc could—and would—cast ballots. Without a centralized organizational structure in place, get-out-the-vote efforts fell to state and local governments, political parties and nonpartisan organizations, all of which had varying approaches to the issue at hand. Inevitably, this uneven rollout resulted in a registration process that played out differently depending on an individual’s race, ethnicity and geographic location.
"The 1920 election is a good moment to remember how much elections are handled at the state level,” says Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. “… The 19th Amendment is ratified, but it’s up to the states to change their entire electoral administration.”
Consider the four Southern states in which women had been barred from voting booths entirely: As Wolbrecht and J. Kevin Corder, a political scientist at Western Michigan University, explain in A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage, officials in Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina decreed that individuals who had failed to register six months prior to the general election were ineligible to vote—a line of reasoning that conveniently overlooked the fact that women only won suffrage some three months after local registration deadlines had passed.
Blocking women from voting was a deliberate choice made by state lawmakers, says Wolbrecht. She adds, “[These states] are dominated by the Democratic Party, and the entire system is designed to minimize participation in elections,” particularly by African American men and women but also by women more broadly.