2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Colorado

This year, many are celebrating the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extended suffrage by preventing states from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. This was a historic day in both United States history and women’s history, and is something worth celebrating. It was the culmination of decades of hard work and struggle for suffragists across the nation, from New York to California, from Colorado to Washington D.C. itself.

Ever wonder how women a century ago tolerated the restrictions placed on them pre- equal rights and women’s lib? Clue: a number of them didn’t. While strictures then may have been weightier than today, women of independent mind, strong will, and dedicated principles simply ignored the limits society tried to impose and did what they had to do.

History Colorado has been collecting, preserving, and interpreting our state’s history for 140 years. Our first collections were stored in a rented room at the Glenarm Hotel—the building that served as the state capitol in 1879.  Obviously, we’ve outgrown the Glenarm and three other locations since that time. We now manage more than 15 million photographs, documents, and artifacts. Considering the number of moves we’ve made, the number of sites and storage facilities statewide that we maintain, and the evolution of the documentation and tracking process—from cursive ledger book entries to typewritten catalog cards to computer database records—it is not surprising that an occasional artifact (or a box of them) has been separated from its provenance.

The Chicano/a movement—el Movimiento—emerged in the late 1960s alongside other civil rights movements, such as Black Power and the American Indian Movement. Although these movements represented different racial and cultural groups in the United States, they shared the overarching goals of the empowerment of, and civil rights for, underrepresented and oppressed peoples.

Maybe you’ve heard about noted Chicano leaders like Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and César Chávez—and rightfully so. They were critical to the development of el Movimiento. Lesser known are the Chicana women who helped to make that movement possible.

Looking ahead to the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020, the women’s suffrage movement and women-led activism was the subject of the National Youth Summit in May.

Hosted by History Colorado, the Smithsonian, and students at five other museums across the country, the live webcast brought students, scholars, teachers, policy experts, and activists together in a national conversation.

The late Barbara E. Sternberg was a member of the Denver Woman’s Press Club who in 2011 wrote the biography Anne Evans—A Pioneer in Colorado’s Cultural History. This article is reprinted with permission from the blog Sternberg developed after this book was published. Anne Evans was a resident of the present-day Center for Colorado Women’s History at the Byers-Evans House Museum, one of History Colorado's museums.