Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Kim Patterson. For more than a century, the majority of American women were denied the right to vote. Scores of determined suffragettes who wanted to reverse this injustice spoke out through publications, lectures, rallies, and appearances before legislators. Finally, these efforts paid off with the ratification in August 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment, which states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Anna Gladys Jenkins Casimir was a student at Baylor in 1920 and recalls events surrounding the ratification: "I remember parades they had in Waco, and there were a lot of women dressed in white on a float, and they were carrying banners or saying, ‘We want the right to vote,' or something like that. I remember how thrilled my mother was that she got to vote in the 1920 election. She was