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Women’s Equality Day — Culture Women's Day United States

Women's Right to Vote / August 26 (1920)

Suffragists, 1917
Women’s suffragists parade in New York City in 1917, carrying placards with signatures of more than a million women.

One of 193 national Women’s Days for Culture of Peace — a day for every UN member state. See the full calendar.

US

When did women get the right to vote in the US?

The struggle for women’s voting rights in the United States spanned over seven decades of activism, protest, and political campaigning. This movement, known as the women’s suffrage movement, ultimately culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920, which prohibited states and the federal government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. However, the path to universal women’s suffrage was neither straightforward nor inclusive, with significant variations in implementation and numerous barriers that continued to prevent many women, particularly women of color, from exercising their newly won right.

How did American women win the vote?

  • 1848. The Seneca Falls Convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, issued the Declaration of Sentiments and called for women’s enfranchisement, a demand controversial even among the roughly 300 attendees.
  • 1869. Wyoming Territory granted women full voting rights, the first jurisdiction in the country to do so; the movement split the same year into the National Woman Suffrage Association (Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, pursuing a federal amendment) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (Lucy Stone, pursuing a state-by-state strategy).
  • 1870. The 15th Amendment barred voting discrimination based on race, but stayed silent on sex, deepening the split between women’s suffrage and the broader civil rights movement of the era.
  • 1890. The two rival organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The same year, Wyoming entered the Union as the first state with women’s suffrage already in place.
  • 1893-1896. Colorado, Utah, and Idaho followed Wyoming, all in the West, driven partly by a wish to attract women settlers and partly by more fluid frontier politics.
  • 1896. The National Association of Colored Women formed, advocating for suffrage while confronting racism within the mainstream movement itself, which frequently marginalized or segregated Black suffragists to avoid alienating Southern white support.
  • 1913. Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union, later the National Woman’s Party, bringing picketing, hunger strikes, and civil disobedience to the campaign in Washington, D.C.
  • 1917. The United States entered World War I, and suffragists increasingly argued that women’s wartime contributions demanded political recognition in return.
  • June 4, 1919. Congress passed the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states.
  • August 18, 1920. Tennessee ratified by one vote, the 36th and deciding state.
  • August 26, 1920. The amendment was certified. Millions of women could now vote, though millions of others, mostly women of color, still could not.
  • 1924. The Indian Citizenship Act extended citizenship, and in principle voting rights, to Native Americans, though several states continued to bar Native voters for decades after.
  • 1943 and 1952. Immigration and citizenship reforms extended naturalization, and with it voting eligibility, to Chinese and then other Asian immigrants, ending exclusions that had blocked Asian American women from the ballot entirely.
  • 1965. The Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and gave the federal government direct enforcement power against discriminatory state and local voting practices, finally making the 19th Amendment’s promise real nationwide.
  • 1971. Congress designated August 26 as Women’s Equality Day, at Bella Abzug’s initiative, also marking the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality held on the same date.
  • 1972. President Nixon issued the first Women’s Equality Day proclamation. Every president since has issued one.

Key Women in the American Women’s Movement

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
A principal organizer of Seneca Falls and author of the Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton provided the movement’s intellectual foundation for its first fifty years, later co-leading the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association.

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
The movement’s most tireless campaigner and its most recognized face, Anthony partnered with Stanton for decades and was arrested in 1872 simply for casting a vote, a case she used to argue her own citizenship rights in court.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
Born into slavery and freed in 1826, Truth became one of the era’s most powerful public speakers, challenging both racial and gender barriers at once, most famously in her “Ain’t I a Woman?” address, and insisting suffrage had to mean something for Black women too.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)
An investigative journalist and anti-lynching campaigner, Wells-Barnett refused to march at the back of the 1913 suffrage parade in Washington as organizers demanded, stepping into the white delegation instead, and spent her career challenging the racism inside the movement she was also building.

Alice Paul (1885-1977)
Founder of the National Woman’s Party, Paul brought more confrontational tactics, picketing, arrests, hunger strikes, to the campaign’s final years, keeping sustained pressure on President Wilson through the amendment’s last push in Congress.

Bella Abzug (1920-1998)
Not part of the original suffrage movement, Abzug connected its legacy to modern feminism as a member of Congress, introducing the 1971 bill that created Women’s Equality Day and linking the 19th Amendment’s history directly to the fight for the (still unratified) Equal Rights Amendment.

Why this day matters today

Women hold about 28% of seats in the 119th Congress (2025), the highest share in U.S. history, and a record number of women won federal and state office in the 2024 elections. That still leaves the United States behind roughly 40 other countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, ranked around 43rd of 146 economies in 2024, held back specifically by its Political Empowerment score. No woman has yet been elected president; Hillary Clinton in 2016 remains the closest any woman has come as a major-party nominee.

Voting rights themselves remain an active, contested question. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder struck down the Voting Rights Act’s coverage formula for federal pre-clearance, and voting-rights advocates and state legislatures have disagreed sharply ever since over what protections remain in its place. Reproductive rights are similarly unsettled: the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the federal right to abortion established in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, returning the question to individual states.

Explore current data at Gender Gap United States.

Culture Women’s Day within Women, Culture and Peace

Culture Women’s Day United States is part of a larger framework: Women, Culture and Peace (WCP). WCP builds on UNESCO’s Culture of Peace programme and the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda.

WCP works through culture, art, and community rather than formal institutions alone. It follows a women-centered organizing model, developed by scholars Stall and Stoecker, that builds relationships and shared leadership instead of competing for power, a principle the American movement itself struggled to live up to internally, as its own record on race makes clear.

Women’s Days for Culture of Peace marks a day for every UN member state, 193 in total. Each day recognizes a nation’s path toward women’s political voice, and opens space to reflect on peacebuilding, gender equality, and the work still ahead.

What could Culture Women’s Day United States become?

The United States doesn’t need a new tradition here, it already has Women’s Equality Day, marked by presidential proclamation every year since 1972. What Culture Women’s Day United States adds is a wider lens: connecting that established date to 192 other countries doing the same on their own, and holding both halves of the story at once, the 1920 amendment and the decades it took to make good on it for every woman.

It could become the day Americans revisit not just 1920, but 1965, and ask what “equality” required in between. It could become an occasion to learn the names left out of the standard story, Wells-Barnett as much as Anthony. It could become a small, yearly habit of attention, a pause that returns each August 26.

Ideas for celebration and reflection

These are starting points, not a program. Pick what resonates. Leave the rest. Add your own.

  • Online. A short post or story marking the day, using #CultureWomensDay or #WCP, linked to the wider calendar of 193 days.
  • In schools. A classroom discussion tracing the line from Seneca Falls in 1848 through 1920 to 1965, asking what “the right to vote” actually required at each step.
  • In culture. A reading or viewing session on suffragists whose stories are less often told, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett among them.
  • In organizations. A pause during a team meeting to mark the day and connect it to current data on women’s political representation.
  • At home or with friends. A conversation about what voting has meant across generations of your own family.
  • In communities. A local voter-registration drive or civic event tied to the day’s history.

Some of these need an afternoon. Others need only a sentence shared with a colleague. Both matter.

A growing network, one country at a time

The United States carries particular weight in this network: the world’s largest economy, a suffrage movement studied and referenced worldwide, and a founding document, the Declaration of Sentiments, deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence itself. As Americans shape what Culture Women’s Day means here, that history adds something distinct to a calendar spanning 193 countries, including its unresolved parts.

Looking Forward

Culture Women’s Day United States holds the same tension its own history does: August 26, 1920, when the 19th Amendment was certified, and the 45 years after it that millions of women still had to fight through before the promise became real. Women’s Equality Day has always, officially, held both ideas at once, commemorating the 1920 victory while, in its founding resolution, explicitly noting that equality itself remained unfinished business.

That’s still true. A record share of women in Congress sits alongside a country ranked outside the world’s top 40 for gender parity. A well-known suffrage story sits alongside a less-told one, about who that story left out and for how long.

The invitation stands open. Explore the Women, Culture and Peace framework, browse the calendar of 193 national days, and mark August 26 as Women’s Equality Day, Culture Women’s Day United States, or both.

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