(slow piano music) (slow piano music) - It took George Washington six years to rectify man's grievances by war, but it took 72 years to establish women's rights by law.

At least 1,000 legal enactments were necessary, and every one was a struggle against ignorant opposition.

Woman's suffrage is a long story of hard work and heartache crowned by victory.

(slow piano music) The yellow roses worn by the suffrage supporters and the red roses worn by the antagonists paled in comparison to the colorful personalities and events leading up to the deciding vote in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the constitutional right to vote.

This pivotal vote was cast on the floor of the General Assembly of Tennessee in August of 1920.

Women had been voicing and participating outside of the vote itself in the political process since our country's founding, with women, wives, mothers writing to their sons and husbands in the legislature, writing to newspapers, advocating for important issues.

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams.

- [Abigail] If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

In Seneca Falls in 1848, at the first women's rights convention, Stanton had the idea that if you don't have the right to vote, you don't have the fundamental right to gain any other rights.

In 1851, Susan B. Anthony met Elizabeth Caty Stanton, and the two began a lifelong journey as friends and political colleagues.

Together they formed the National Woman's Suffrage Association in 1869.

In 1878, the Anthony Amendment was drafted and presented to become the 16th amendment to the Constitution.

It would continue to be presented by Anthony and her successors to 40 consecutive sessions of Congress, eventually becoming the 19th Amendment.

Once it passed, it would still need to be ratified by 3/4 of the 48 states at that time, which meant 36 state legislatures had to pass it by majority vote.

(gentle music) The suffrage movement did not start in the South, but there were certainly southern women who wanted to vote.

One of the first suffrage leaders in Tennessee was Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, who cast her vote in the 1876 election and made a speaking tour with Stanton and Anthony.

The Memphis Equal Rights Association, Tennessee's first suffrage organization, was founded by Elizabeth's sister, Lide Parker Smith Meriwether.

During the centennial exposition held in Nashville in 1897, the Meriwether sisters formed the first statewide organization, the Tennessee Equal Rights Association.

By 1913, suffrage was in full swing in Tennessee.

The Tennessee Equal Rights Association, founded by the Meriwether sisters, was now the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, and in 1914, the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association, Incorporated, hosted the 46th Annual National American Woman's Suffrage Association Convention in Nashville.

(gentle music) In 1919, 41 years after the Anthony Amendment was first presented, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate approved the joint resolution.

The 19th Amendment had finally passed.

By the spring of 1920, 35 states had ratified, making it just one state short of the 36 required to amend the Constitution.

Of the remaining states, there were only three marginally potential candidates, Delaware, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Delaware was enmeshed in some Republican in-fighting, which made timely pro-suffrage action nearly impossible, and the proposal was voted down on June 2, 1920.

Inevitably, the bill was tabled in North Carolina, leaving Tennessee as the last hope for passage in 1920.

Tennessee's kind of a border state, idologically and geographically, and that kind of made it possible, I think.

- The governor of Tennessee in 1920 was Albert Houston Roberts.

Initially, Roberts did not want to call a special session.

He was facing an up-hill battle.

He was up for re-election, it was an election year.

He had challenges from within his own party, so he was a man who had a lot at stake personally during the summer of 1920.

There were calls to call a special session of the state legislature in to discuss and hopefully ratify the amendment.

Roberts initially did not want to do this.

There was a clause in the state constitution that actually prohibited it, and he seems to have initially used that as the excuse not to call the session.

NAWSA had members lean on President Wilson in Washington to send a telegram to Nashville, Tennessee, and after consulting with the attorney general of the United States, who happened to be a Tennessean, William Frierson, President Wilson agreed, a state constitution could not overrule the federal Constitution.

Therefore, there was no block to calling a special session.

So after receiving a personal telegram, from President Wilson essentially, Roberts had no choice.

He had to.

And like that, the battle was on.

(gentle music) All eyes were on Nashville as pro-suffragist and anti-suffragist converged on the state capital.

- There was, initially, a lot of political in-fighting.

I think it's been said by many others that we kind of have a simplified view of history, and we think all women were suffragists and all men were anti, and in fact, political factions split up even the suffragists.

On one side, there was Catherine Talty Kenny, chairman of ratification under the auspices of Tennessee League of Women Voters.

She set up headquarters at the Maxwell House Hotel.

Catherine Kenny was the one who once threw out the first baseball during the season at Sulpher Dell A look away from this building Sulpher Dell Baseball Park and a heckler had yelled at her something to the effect of Women stay in the women's sphere and she shot back, the world is the women's sphere Also in the ranks was Abby Milton, who would go on to become the first president of the League of Women Voters.

Abby Milton was the wife of George Fort Milton who was the very wealthy publisher of the Chattanooga News, a pro sufferage newspaper She was described as attractive, and brilliant and She was also one of the very key players in the Tennessee Sufferage movement - So the problem with Roberts and Catherine Kenny and Abby Milton was they were in different camps.

The Democratic Party was split.

The Republicans were out of the picture.

They were party of Lincoln.

They didn't really have a big role in Tennessee.

So Roberts was really in one camp, and Abby Milton and Catherine Kenny were in another camp.

So Governor Roberts favored the more moderate Kate Burch Warner to head his ratification committee.

She had a gift for gentle persuasion.

Also on the roster of key players in the pro-suffrage movement were Betty M. Donaldson, president of the Davidson County Women's Temperance Union and Sue Shelton White, who represented the National Women's Party in the absence of their leader, Alice Paul.

- Sue Shelton White was from Jackson, Tennessee, and she was one of the more militant suffragists.

She was a key leader in the Woman's Party, and she wore on her lapel or her dress what was called a prison pin, which indicated she had been jailed for picketing, particularly picketing the White House during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

By August 1st, Sue Shelton White had the National Women's Party set up with offices at the Tulane Hotel at 8th and Church streets.

Another powerful presence was Lizzie Crozier French, president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association.

Finally, but certainly not least, there was Anne Dallas Dudley.

Anne Dallas Dudley was a Nashville jewel She was a local Blue Blood came from a prominent family She was described as being very witty, eloquent She spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 1920 and she was such a belle that the bands on the floor struck up "Oh You Beautiful Doll" which was one of the popular songs of the day - She became involved in 1914.

She led a parade of 2,000 people from the court house to Centennial Park.

When an anti-suffrage man challenged Dudley with the proclamation, "Only men can bear arms, "so only men should vote."

She was undaunted and quickly responded, "Yes, but only women can bear armies."

(upbeat music) Dudley would be away for some time during the session, representing the suffrage movement at the Democratic National Convention in California.

The difference between the various groups of suffragists gathered in Nashville threatened to weaken the movement at a crucial moment.

A unifying leader was needed.

- The summons went out to Carrie Chapman Catt, who was probably the leading suffragist in the United States at that Point.

Catt took matters swiftly into hand.

- [Carrie] My dear Mrs. Warner, if you tell the men that Mrs. Kenny is fighting against you, and she tells them that you are fighting her, the only result is that the men will call it a women's fight and find plenty of excuses for declining to ratify.

- When she got the summons from Nashville, she packed an overnight bag, got on the train, came south, and she sort of played coy with the press when she got here.

She claimed she didn't have a plan.

That she only planned to stay a couple of days.

She later admitted, though the weather was miserably hot, and the conditions were terrible, she took one look at the opposition and what they were mustering, and she made the decision on the spot to stay.

She came for an overnight stay.

She ended up staying six weeks.

A number of significant African American suffragists were also present in the Tennessee state capital.

Amongst them was Ida B.

Wells.

Born into slavery, she became an accomplished investigative reporter and international speaker.

Next, there was Juno Frankie Pierce, foundress of the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls.

She asked, "What will Negro women do with the vote?

"We will stand by the white women.

"We are only asking one thing, a square deal."

Also present was Mary Church Terrell, who eloquently stated.

- [Mary] How can anyone who is able to use reason and who believes in dealing justice to all God's creatures think it right to withhold from one half the human race rights and privileges freely accorded to the other half, which is neither more deserving nor more capable of exercising them?

Mary Church Terrel from Memphis was Oberlin educated She was eloquent, elegant a member of a prominent local Memphis family And she was instrumental in organizing the colored women of Memphis and Tennessee And then there were the anti-suffragists.

Miss Pearson was an educator, an elocutionist.

she was extremely disgusted with the suffrage movement [steam locomotive] Josephine Pearson, Tennessee president of the Southern Women's Rejection League led her troops into Nashville.

She arrived the same day as Carrie Chapman Catt and checked into the same hotel, The Hermitage.

- You know, we kind of take it as a no-brainer that everyone was for women having the right to vote.

There were plenty of women back in that time who did not think that women should have the right to vote, and it was a rather heated debate.

Of course, this was not just a women's spat, as Catt intimated it might be viewed.

The old fear that the central government would compromise states rights was rearing its head again.

- The discourse was very much about states rights, preserving the old south.

They had a speaker that they called him a young Andrew Jackson, and he was just very, there was all this great drama about preserving states rights in the south.

Also, it was racist.

I mean, we can't deny that.

A lot of it was well, if you give women the vote, then you're gonna have a lot more black voters, too.

They had a little bit different approach because they had to work with the kind of Southern ideology.

They had to work with race relations that were a little bit different.

They had to work with the kind of legacy of the Civil War and states rights because suffrage was seen by opponents as another example of the federal government coming in and telling us what to do.

While the race card would be one of the biggest issues argued from the camp of the anti-suffragists, it was not the only point of contention.

- It had to do with the railroad.

It had to do with prohibition.

It had to do with all these other kind of interrelated items and whether people liked each other.

Prohibition and suffrage had a long relationship.

(gentle music) - [Jane] There was a belief that if women got the vote, they would all vote to keep prohibition forever intact.

- One of the factors that came into play here, that made the fight such a dirty fight was the presence of many, many lobbyists from some of the labor and distilling and manufacturing entities of Nashville.

They had a vested interest in not letting suffrage pass.

[train on tracks] - The railroads would lose money, they did lose money with prohibition because they made a lot of money transporting alcohol around, across state lines.

So the railroads were against women getting the right to vote because they believed that if women had the right to vote, they would forever lose all this business.

It seemed that all bets were off.

The antis were giving out free liquor in a mysterious room on the eighth floor of The Hermitage.

- I think it's really a case of politics makes strange bedfellows.

The antis for the most part tended to be the old southern matron, the conservative women of the South, and ironically, they found one of their strongest allies with the old distilling interests, which were out of business, officially, because of prohibition, but there was a lot of boozing going on.

And that's one of those factors that kind of threw people for a loop who were visiting Nashville at the time.

There were stories of senators and representatives roaming the halls of The Hermitage Hotel drunk and passed out in the lobbies at a time when prohibition had just gone into effect as the law of the land.

One observer who commented about this said that they were later told that when controversy struck that whiskey and politics in Tennessee went hand in hand.

(gentle music) On Monday, August 9, 1920, the 61st General Assembly of the State of Tennessee convened.

On August 11th, the Senate set action on ratification as a special order for the day.

The galleries were packed, and there was no shortage of drama.

On Friday, August the 13th, after a heated two-hour debate, the Tennessee State Senate surprisingly voted in favor of ratification with the final count of 25 to four.

The Tennessee House of Representatives would prove more challenging when it convened.

- It was a sultry day, hot, humid, of course the capital wasn't air conditioned, so you can imagine the conditions inside the House chamber.

The suffragists needed 49 votes to win but only had 47, having recently lost the Speaker of the House Seth Walker.

Mrs. Dudley was back in town from the Democratic Convention and was positioned just behind the rail with a little notebook and pencil to keep count of the roll herself.

On August 20, 1920, when the session was called to order, many representatives on the floor favored tabling the bill.

The act of tabling was called to a vote not once but twice.

- It was a tactic.

Tabling the amendment would be tantamount to killing the amendment in Tennessee.

- Now one of the surprises during the tabling action was the actions of Banks Turner, another Democrat, conservative, came in with a red rose on his lapel.

He was an anti-suffragist, but when the motion was put up to table the bill, and they had their vote, the first poll on that, it came out the results as 48-48, a tie.

There would be no tabling.

This was such a surprise to Seth Walker, the notoriously anti-suffrage speaker of the House that he asked for a recount, a second vote.

Speaker Walker came down from the dais, buttonholed Banks Turner, and began to whisper in his ear very earnestly while the vote was going on in the background.

In fact, Banks Turner actually didn't even vote during that second one until the very end, and all eyes were on them as this discussion was going on.

Neither one ever really revealed what was said, but at the end of the discussion, Turner threw Seth Walker's arm off of his shoulder, turned to the House and in a very loud voice said, "No!"

And the vote once again stood at 48-48, and the motion to table the bill was finished.

And so a vote was called.

- Young, 24-year-old Harry Burn, Republican House member from McMinn County, sitting in the third row from the speaker's rostrum to the right was hoping upon hope that the next vote, the one to actually vote on passage of the amendment, that it wouldn't come down to him.

He was number seven on the list of 96 House members that were there that day.

He had been an anti-suff.

He wore a red rose that day, indicating that he was an anti-suff, and when the roll was called Harry Burn, on the issue of whether or not to pass the 19th Amendment for Tennessee to ratify the 19th Amendment answered, "Aye."

It turned out that Harry had in his breast coat pocket a letter that he had read over and over, and it was from his mother.

His mother, Febb Burn.

"Don't forget to be a good boy "and help Mrs. Thomas Catt with her rats," referring to the people for ratification.

"Is she the one that put rat in ratification, ha.

"No more from Mama."

And that's what she said.

And Harry took that to heart.

He turned upside down the floor, and Tennessee became the perfect 36.

[clapping] Mayhem broke loose, with rose petals being torn and strewn about the room.

And on the 24th, Governor Roberts signed the certificate of ratification.

On August 20, 1920, Vice President Thomas Marshall and Secretary Bainbridge Colby signed the bill, and the proclamation went out declaring the ratification and addition of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, ensuring the right to vote for generations of women to come.

[Instrumental Music] - It's such an honor to be the speaker in such a historic chamber.

I mean, that is the location where it all happened, and Tennessee played such a pivotal role in women earning the right to vote that it's a real honor to serve as the speaker of that body.

I quickly thank my male colleagues, however, because it wouldn't have been possible without them.

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