Members of the League of Women Voters of Nebraska will be acknowledged on Thursday, Feb. 14, by Senator Lynne Walz and members of the legislature in conjunction with a resolution recognizing August 2019 as Nebraska Woman’s Suffrage Month. Walz introduced the legislative resolution with 44 other members of the Nebraska legislature on Feb. 8. It was read into the record on Feb. 11.
The recognition kicks off a celebration from August 2019 through August 2020 by the LWVNE of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women in the United States the right to vote. In the final campaign for women’s suffrage, Nebraska was the 14th state to ratify the 19th Amendment on August 2, 1919. Over the next year, other states followed with Tennessee becoming the 36th needed and final state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920. The 19th Amendment officially became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920.
“The Nebraska League was organized in June 1920,” said Sherry Miller, president of the LWVNE, “and was fully ready to lead the way for women’s suffrage in Nebraska when it was ratified later that year. It has been leading the way in voter education and protection ever since.”
The ratification of the 19th Amendment was the hard-fought and successful culmination of a 72-year campaign by several generations of suffragists. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women and men at the Seneca Falls, NY, convention in 1848 produced a Declaration of Sentiments that called for actions to equalize women’s status with men, including the right to vote.
Since winning the vote in 1920, more women than men have voted in every presidential election since 1964 and, since 1980, a greater proportion of women than men has voted in presidential elections. In 2019 more women serve in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures than ever before with 102 women in the House of Representatives, 25 in the Senate, and 2,117 in state legislatures. There are now more women senators in the Nebraska legislature than ever before. “This diversity in our Unicameral creates a more equitable conversation and better represents the makeup of our state,” Walz said.
The League of Women Voters of Nebraska with its local chapters in Omaha, Lincoln, Seward and Hastings plans a yearlong schedule of events, including participation in the 2020 Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.
Read the resolution below.
