Amend the amendment process

Many women would no doubt agree that Harry Burn, as a member of the male species, was good for something.

Burn singlehandedly gave women the right to vote. As a legislator in Tennessee, Burn had been voting against suffrage for women when the 19th Amendment came before that state’s Senate and House of Representatives for a ratification vote. On Aug. 18, 1920, the 24-year-old Burn recognized that his anti-suffrage vote in the House would keep it tied 48-48. He decided to obey his mom, who had urged him to support the right of women to vote.

Tennessee was almost the final hope for suffragists. Eight state legislatures had already voted down ratification, and the governors of Vermont and Connecticut - which have since elected female governors - would not even authorize a vote in their respective legislatures. Tennessee’s legislature was the last of 36 states to ratify the 19th Amendment, which became law on Aug. 26. All American women were allowed to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

The 72-year struggle to grant women the right to vote is a fascinating story, which makes one wonder if there could have been an easier way. James Wilson, the first delegate to the Constitutional Convention to speak publicly in favor of the Constitution, assured fellow Pennsylvanians at the State House on Oct. 6, 1787, that serious problems with the Constitution can be resolved later through the amendment process, according to Professor Pauline Maier’s book, “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.”

Wilson did not seem to mention that the framers of the Constitution prohibited a simple majority of members of Congress, the people or the states from amending the Constitution. They raised the bar so high that the most reasonable measures could be rejected. Article V requires the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states to enact an amendment.

Article V reads in full: “The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and forth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

Defenders of the Constitution in its current form - counting the 27 amendments - would contend that this uphill process ensures that only worthy amendments will become the law of the land. It also ensures that the will of the majority is thwarted and that minorities can be denied basic rights.

Any proposed amendment, no matter how beneficial, can easily be blocked on the basis of parochial interests by one-third plus one of members of the House or the Senate or, if it gets past Congress, stopped short in one-fourth plus one of the state legislatures.

It is ironic that women in America traditionally outnumber men yet could not vote until 1920.

A New York Times account dated June 5, 1919, reported that women have clamored for the right to vote since the American Revolution. The Seneca Falls, N.Y., women’s rights convention in 1848 was the first major suffrage demonstration.

Movement leader Susan B. Anthony was arrested in 1872 when she made a test vote at the polls and was arrested. She refused to pay her fine, but was never jailed.

Anthony drafted the proposed federal amendment in 1878 and a California senator introduced the amendment in the Senate.

The amendment reads: “Section 1 - 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; Section 2 - Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.”

The Times account adds: “In 1878 the vote was 16 yeas to 34 nays; in 1914 it failed by 11 votes, in 1918 it failed by two votes, and on Feb. 10, 1919, it failed by one vote. It has been voted on three times in the House. It failed there in 1915 by 78 votes. In 1918 it passed the House with one vote to spare. On May 21, 1919, it passed the House with 14 votes more than the necessary two-thirds.”

The Times story continues, “Foreign countries or divisons of countries in which women have suffrage are: Isle of Man, granted 1881; New Zealand, 1893; Australia, 1902; Finland, 1906; Norway, 1907; Iceland, 1913; Denmark, 1915; Russia, 1917; Canada, Austria, England, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Scotland and Wales, 1918; Holland and Sweden, 1919.”

The final drive to achieve congressional support paralleled Woodrow Wilson’s administration. When Wilson was inaugurated president in 1913, Alice Paul from Mt. Laurel, N.J., led a march of 8,000 participants in Washington. Through the years before Congress finally acted, Paul and the National Women’s Party picketed the White House, staged large suffrage marches and demonstrations, and spent time in jail, wrote Jone Johnson Lewis in About.com/Women’s History.

“A family legend is that my grandmother was one of a number of women who chained themselves to a courthouse door in Minneapolis during this period,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson recounted that the work of women who were employed in factories to support America’s role in World War I inspired the President Wilson to finally endorse the women’s right to vote. He said in a Sept. 18, 1918, speech: “We have made partners of the women in this war. Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and to a partnership of right?”

So finally the showdown arrived in Tennessee as both supporters and opponents lobbied the legislature. The Senate passed the amendment and in the House it all boiled down to Harry Burn, then 24 years old. He broke the tie in favor of the amendment after his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, sent him a telegram, which read in part: “Dear Son: Hurrah, and vote for suffrage!“

In a biographical sketch, Brown was quoted to say years after the vote: “I had always believed that women had an inherent right to vote. It was a logical attitude from my standpoint. My mother was a college woman, a student of national and international affairs who took an interest in all public issues. She could not vote. Yet the tenant farmers on our farm, some of whom were illiterate, could vote. On that roll call, confronted with the fact that I was going to go on record for time and eternity on the merits of the question, I had to vote for ratification.”

Johnson recalled that Charlotte Woodward was the only woman who attended the convention of 1848 who was alive in 1920 when she was finally eligible to vote, but evidently she was too ill to go out to vote.

Had the amendment process been simpler…