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.
19th Amendment
to the Constitution
Seventy years ago - Aug. 26, 1920 - Harry Burns, a 24-year-old Tennessee lawmaker, cast the decisive vote that ratified the 19th Amendment and opened voting booths to women.
That action granted a right that hundreds of Pennsylvanians - members of such groups as the Woman's Suffrage Party of Allegheny County, the Equal Franchise Federation of Pittsburgh and even the Pennsylvania Men's League for Women's Suffrage - had marched up Philadelphia's Broad Street to secure.
It provided a privilege for which women's-rights activists Mary Winsor of Haverford and Alice Paul of Mount Laurel spent 60 days in jail - punishment for picketing the White House.
The women who fought for suffrage are nearly all gone now. Coming of age is a generation of women who may use that power to define issues their great- grandmothers could not have imagined.
"They were real heroines," said Alison B. Graham, who became acquainted with suffragists when she joined the Lower Merion and Narberth chapter of the League of Women Voters in the 1970s. Like the Philadelphia chapter, it was founded in the year that women got the vote, as suffragists turned their attention to how best to use their new power.
During the campaign to obtain the vote, "there was a lot of pressure put on them," Graham said, recalling a story told to her by one of the chapter's original members, Florence Kane, whose husband, Thomas, was an official of Sun Oil Co.
"J. Howard Pew, the company founder, was extremely conservative and not too keen on uppity ladies," Graham said. "He suggested to Thomas, 'Maybe you should speak to her.' Thomas said, 'I have spoken to her, and I absolutely support what she is doing.' "
Although the Pennsylvania Women's Suffrage Association was organized in 1869 and the Pennsylvania Senate first voted against a state amendment to grant women the vote in 1887, it was not until after the turn of the century that the suffrage question began to gain political prominence in the state.
The first street meetings in Philadelphia were held in 1911. "Not a few came scoffingly and went away thoughtfully," the Public Ledger reported.
Emily Mudd, now 91 and professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, participated in the first Philadelphia parade for votes for women, with her sister and her mother, Clementine Rhodes Hartshorne.
