![]() ![]() However, as New York suffragist Mary Peck recognized, the Secretary’s act “was public notice that the Tennessee ratification had been received, examined, accepted and formally recorded as the final step in adopting the Nineteenth Amendment.” The United States would never be the same.Īt the suffragists’ great celebration in the capital that night, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby represented the Administration and, as Carrie Catt noted, “congratulated the suffragists upon their freedom.” The legislature in the state of Tennessee ratified the amendment on August 18, making it the required 36th state to do so. ![]() Suffragists had finally won their epic, decades-long struggle for the vote and the formal proclamation that the Secretary signed merely confirmed it. “We were all too stunned to make any comment.” “So quietly as that,” lobbyist Maud Wood Park, who was there, later wrote, “we learned that the last step in the enfranchisement of women had been taken, and the struggle of more than seventy years brought to a successful end.” “The Secretary has signed the proclamation,” the Secretary of State’s office told Carrie Chapman Catt over the phone on August 26, 1920. Collections of the Library of Congress () Women celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment outside the National Woman's Party Washington, DC headquarters in 1920. ![]()
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