Confronting a reluctant Congress, women followed the example set by the suffragettes of England. They paraded, agitated, demonstrated, went on hunger strikes, and chained themselves to the White House fences. Belatedly - and even reluctantly - President Wilson came out on their side “as a war measure,” and in the summer of 1919 Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stated that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied by the United States, or by any State on account of sex.”

Thereafter, notwithstanding implacable hostility in most of the southern states, the amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the states in record time; on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution.