VCE History: Area of Study 2: Social & Cultural Change: America: 1920s-1930s

The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. It declares that “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 amendment, which granted women the right to vote, represented the pinnacle of the women’s suffrage movement, which was led by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In their decades-long struggle for female enfranchisement, women’s rights advocates met with strong opposition from anti-suffrage activists.

Primary documents from the United States National Archives.

Martin L. Calhoun, of the Alabama Male Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage, sent this letter to Senator Duncan U. Fletcher opposing the proposed Susan B. Anthony Suffrage Amendment. He wrote that each state should "be permitted to solve the issue for itself," and asks "in all seriousness – what will become of white supremacy in the grand old South?"

The Nineteenth Amendment officially eliminated sex as a barrier to voting throughout the United States. It expanded voting rights to more people than any other single measure in American history. And yet, the legacy of the Nineteenth Amendment, in the short term and over the next century, turned out to be complicated. It advanced equality between the sexes but left intersecting inequalities of class, race, and ethnicity intact. It stimulated important policy changes but left many reform goals unachieved. It helped women, above all white women, find new footings in government agencies, political parties, and elected offices—and, in time, even run for president—and yet left most outside the halls of power. Hardly the end of the struggle for diverse women's equality, the Nineteenth Amendment became a crucial step, but only a step, in the continuing quest for more representative democracy.

The Women's Suffrage Movement opened many doors for the women of American and allowed them to achieve a greater role in the society.

Women’s suffrage is sometimes portrayed as the triumphant end of a movement, the hard-won reward for decades of marches, protests, hunger strikes, feeding tubes. Really, it was a beginning. One of many times America has transformed itself to make the government more accountable to more of its citizens, at least in theory.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period of intense creativity in music and the visual arts as well. Notable African American writers of the time included Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, each of whom explored the alienation and marginality of African Americans in their work. Many literary works of the period incorporated folk material and elements of the blues tradition. Outside of literature, artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglas and performers such as Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker made their mark as well. Although the vitality of the movement suffered during the Great Depression, the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance survived in the 1930s with the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps.

The “new woman” of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: “To Bob or Not to Bob?” The short, sculpted hair of the “bob” marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as “America’s Sweetheart”), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

From the Harvard Library, an exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Can refine search by subject, year, places, etc.