Getting the Vote
Harriot Blatch believed that the vote could be won in New York State if the organizers continued to pressure lawmakers and focus their energy on the campaign in order to break the legislative deadlock that had existed for almost 20 years on the issue of suffrage. In 1915 the suffrage amendment was submitted to voters for ratification, and it failed. In Rockland, it lost by only 400 votes, but in Nyack the poll carried.
National conversations at the time questioned whether suffragists should spend so much time and energy on individual state campaigns if it was possible to get votes for all women on the national level. More and more, suffragists began focusing on the Washington work. After five long years, Harriot Blatch called a meeting of the WPU Executive Committee and offered the resolution to dissolve the WPU.
In 1917, women in New York state gained the right to vote. In Rockland, the vote had shifted by nearly 1,000 votes in favor of woman suffrage. Statewide, the amendment passed by 88,000 votes. This may have, in part, been due to a widely published letter from President Woodrow Wilson, offering his support for the state amendment and hoping for New York to “set a great example in this matter.” On June 4, 1919, Congress passed the 19th amendment and sent it back to the states for ratification. New York State legislators who had previously worked so hard to thwart suffrage efforts ratified the amendment unanimously, and it was adopted nation-wide on August 26, 1920.