Women, the Sheppard-Towner Act and the 19th Amendment
Women and the Vote
In August 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, completing a campaign for women’s suffrage that had been active since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. The amendment stated that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex. It was a landmark achievement, but its practical impact was more limited than its supporters had hoped — and for Black women in the South, it changed almost nothing.
The 19th Amendment gave women the legal right to vote in federal and state elections from 1920. However, in the southern states, Jim Crow voter suppression tactics — literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation — that were used to prevent African American men from voting applied equally to African American women. White women in the South voted in significant numbers; Black women largely could not.
The Sheppard-Towner Act
The most significant piece of federal legislation directly connected to women’s political power in this period was the Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act, signed into law in November 1921. The act provided federal grants to states to establish prenatal and child welfare clinics. Women’s organisations, particularly the newly formed League of Women Voters, had lobbied hard for it, and many congressmen feared the consequences of opposing women’s welfare issues so soon after the 19th Amendment.
The Sheppard-Towner Act was genuinely significant: it created over 3,000 child health centres across the country, and infant mortality rates fell in states that participated. However, it was strongly opposed by the American Medical Association, which saw it as government interference in medicine, and by conservatives who feared it as a step towards socialism. Funding was repeatedly contested, and the act was allowed to expire in 1929 without renewal.
After the 19th Amendment, the suffrage movement split over strategy. The League of Women Voters, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, focused on educating women voters and working within the existing party system. Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party took a more radical approach, introducing the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 — a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit all sex-based discrimination. The ERA was repeatedly blocked in Congress through the 1920s; it was not passed until 1972, and even then it failed ratification.
Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League argued that the ERA would actually harm women workers by removing the protective labour legislation (such as limits on night shifts and maximum hours) that reformers had fought for. This tension between formal legal equality and protective special legislation divided women’s organisations throughout the 1920s and beyond.
Flappers and Changing Social Norms
The 1920s saw visible changes in women’s public behaviour, associated most strongly with the figure of the flapper. Young, urban, middle-class women cut their hair short, wore shorter skirts, danced at jazz clubs, and smoked in public. These visible changes shocked conservative opinion and suggested a broader loosening of Victorian social norms.
However, historians caution against overstating the significance of flapper culture. It was largely confined to urban, white, middle-class women. Most women — rural, working-class, or African American — saw little change in their economic position or their domestic expectations. Women workers remained concentrated in low-paid sectors: domestic service, garment manufacture, and clerical work. Married women faced widespread social pressure and often legal barriers to remaining in paid employment.
The Sheppard-Towner Maternity Act of 1921 was the first federal welfare law specifically aimed at women and children. It funded state child health clinics and reduced infant mortality where it operated. Opposition from the American Medical Association and conservative politicians, who saw it as “socialist,” led to its expiry in 1929 when Congress refused to renew funding.
Despite the vote and the Sheppard-Towner Act, much remained unchanged. Women were still largely excluded from professional careers in law and medicine by informal discrimination. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass, so legal inequalities in employment and property rights remained. African American women in the South were effectively denied the vote by Jim Crow measures. And the cultural freedoms of flapper culture were always limited to a minority — most American women in the 1920s were wives and mothers in rural or small-town environments where expectations had changed little.