This is not true. Here is the full text of the 19th Amendment:
"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.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
This only applies to women, because no states at that time were denying men the right to vote on account of being male.
In the United States, all white men who did not own property had the right to vote by 1856, regardless of which state they lived in. The 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870) extended that right to all men, regardless of race. The 19th Amendment (ratified in 1920) extended that right to women.
Sorry, you're right about the fifteenth amendment. There's myths to dispel concerning what the amendments do or do not do, and in this case, the nineteenth is a bit more complicated. For all intents and purposes, women actually benefit more from the fifteenth in conjunction with the nineteenth. But all of that is due the way these are worded.
Let me break this down...
The text of the document reads, “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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Straightforward, right? But then you have to realize, this is
law and laws need to be interpreted. Based on the
language in the nineteenth amendment itself, you can see that it does not
give women the right to vote, but rather
took away sex as a barrier to voting for U.S. citizens. This difference is crucial to understand.
During that time, states and localities could still prevent women—
and men—from voting through other means such as poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, or other discriminatory practices under Jim Crow. Native American women also did not receive the vote because were not considered U.S. citizens until the passage of the Snyder Act in 1924. Immigrant women could also not vote because they were not citizens of the U.S. For example, Chinese-American women did not receive the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment because the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred them from becoming U.S. citizens.
It was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act that many of these limitations set up women (and men) across the country were lifted. Also, look into the 2013 Supreme Court decision in
Shelby V.
Holder. This decision has invalidated a key provision in the 1965 Act, making it far easier to change election and voting laws at the local level to discriminate against or suppress the vote of certain groups. Despite the 19th amendment, there are still many women (and men) who are citizens of the United States still find their right to vote denied or made practically impossible to exercise.
All this is to say is the nineteenth amendment isn't what you really think it is and men and women alike probably owe more to the fifteenth amendment to our right to vote. Without the fifteenth in place, I know for sure I wouldn't have had the right to vote for a good portion of my life.
