Michigan Votes for Women: A Year Before the Nation
Near Lansing, Michigan
In the fall of nineteen eighteen, the male voters of Michigan approved a state constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. It was not the first time they had been asked. Michigan voters had rejected women's suffrage in eighteen seventy-four, in nineteen twelve, and again in nineteen thirteen. The nineteen twelve failure was particularly bitter: the amendment had appeared to pass before a suspicious recount reversed the result by fewer than eight hundred votes.
By nineteen eighteen, however, the calculus had shifted. Women's labor contributions during the First World War were visible and undeniable. Suffrage organizations across Michigan had spent decades building local chapter networks. The amendment passed with fifty-four percent of the vote, giving Michigan women full state voting rights a full year before Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Michigan's reaction in the legislature was swift. On June tenth, nineteen nineteen, the Michigan Legislature became the third state in the nation to formally ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. The vote in the all-male chamber was unanimous.
The movement had particular strength in Lansing, where women had been active in civic organizations throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Suffrage arguments made in the capitol rotunda and in legislative hearings here helped build the political momentum that eventually carried the amendment nationally.
The Nineteenth Amendment was certified on August eighteenth, nineteen twenty. By that date Michigan women had already been voting for two years. The state they helped push over the finish line was their own.
