When women won passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, they did not win the right to vote. Contrary to popular assumption, the right to vote does not exist in the U.S. Constitution. Just what, then, did the women’s suffrage amendment accomplish? Clarifying this history, this talk positions 1920 as the middle of a much larger story about the curious—and largely unknown—absence of a constitutional voting right for all Americans.

Lisa Tetrault is an associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of “The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement.”

The annual C. Mildred Thompson Lecture is sponsored by the History Department.