BY THE LEARNING NETWORK

 JANUARY 12, 2012 4:03 AM

Library of Congress George Grantham Bain Collection Two suffragists holding a National Woman Suffrage Association banner in 1913. The United States did not amend the Constitution to grant women the right to vote until 1920.

On Jan. 12, 1915, the United States House of Representatives voted, 204-174, to reject a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote.

The New York Times recounted the House’s 10 hours of debate in front of galleries packed with suffragists. The Times noted that it was a “solemn day in the galleries” as the “women there were slow to laugh, and they seemed too much awed by the speaker’s call for order to applaud even their strongest champion.”

The speaker ordered silence from the galleries three times, once for hissing during a speech made by anti-suffrage Representative Stanley Bowdle of Ohio. Mr. Bowdle proclaimed: “The women of this smart capital are beautiful. Their beauty is disturbing to business; their feet are beautiful; their ankles are beautiful, but here I must pause — for they are not interested in the state.”

The vote was the second defeat for a suffrage amendment in less than a year, as the Senate had voted against one in March 1914. Nonetheless, suffragist leaders were pleased to have had the issue discussed in Congress, which had gone 46 years without voting on whether women should be allowed to vote. The only other time was in 1868, when the suffrage amendment was first brought before Congress.

The optimism of the suffragists was well founded. In 1918, a suffrage amendment was passed in the House, but fell two votes short in the Senate. The next year, the House and the Senate voted in favor of suffrage, passing the 19th Amendment, which declared that the right “to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”