The certification followed Tennessee's decisive ratification vote days earlier, capping a movement that began at Seneca Falls in 1848. The date is now commemorated in the United States as Women's Equality Day, marking the culmination of a 72-year campaign led by generations of activists, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Alice Paul.
The fight for women's suffrage in the United States had dragged on for generations, through marches, hunger strikes, jailings, and bitter parliamentary maneuvering, by the time Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the proclamation certifying the 19th Amendment's ratification in a quiet, almost anticlimactic ceremony at his home early in the morning, without the suffragist leaders present who had fought hardest for it.
The amendment's final ratification had come days earlier in Tennessee, where a young state legislator named Harry Burn switched his vote at the last moment after receiving a note from his mother urging him to 'be a good boy' and support suffrage, breaking a tie and pushing the measure over the required three-quarters of states. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party had spent years staging pickets outside the White House, enduring arrests and forced feedings during hunger strikes, while more moderate suffragists like Carrie Chapman Catt worked the halls of state legislatures.
The amendment's text was simple — the right to vote 'shall not be denied or abridged... on account of sex' — but its passage did not extend equal access to all women, particularly Black women in the Jim Crow South who continued to face poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence for decades. Congress designated August 26 as Women's Equality Day in 1971, cementing the date's place in the long, uneven history of American democracy.