Tennessee Suffrage, August 18, 1920: The Thirty-Sixth State

By the summer of nineteen twenty, thirty-five states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of the vote on account of sex. The amendment needed thirty-six. The count had stalled. Tennessee was the last state where ratification still seemed possible.

The Tennessee legislature convened a special session in Nashville. For weeks, suffragist and anti-suffragist forces lobbied every legislator they could reach. The suffragists wore yellow roses. The anti-suffragists wore red. Hotels filled with organizers, politicians, and paid agitators. The railroad companies and the liquor industry, which feared women voters would support prohibition, funded the opposition. The National Woman's Party and other suffrage organizations funded the other side.

On August eighteenth, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted. The outcome was forty-nine in favor and forty-seven against. One vote made the difference.

That vote was cast by Harry T. Burn, the youngest member of the legislature, a twenty-four-year-old Republican from McMinn County in eastern Tennessee. He had been recorded as opposing ratification. That morning, he had received a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, who wrote to tell him to be a good boy and vote for suffrage. He had the letter in his pocket when he voted yes. The note is held today in the Tennessee State Library and Archives.

Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state. The amendment was ratified. Women across the country could vote in the presidential election that November.

The women who had organized and fought and lobbied for this moment for decades included Black suffragists who had worked alongside white suffragists and who were almost immediately re-disenfranchised by poll taxes, literacy tests, and other mechanisms in Tennessee and across the South. The amendment passed. Its guarantee did not reach every woman equally for another half century.