Process Paper

When the National History Day project was first presented to me, my teacher said that we
could make our topic about anything under the sun and more. I have always been very interested
in history from a woman’s perspective because they are often overlooked, which provides a
sense of ambiguity to history that is waiting to be uncovered. However, there are a few events
throughout history where women aren’t ignored, which intrigues me. Specifically, women’s
suffrage and the 19​th​ amendment. I didn’t want to recount the anecdote of how women gained the
right to vote, but I knew I wanted to do something related to it.
The first I did was find out what the 19​th​ amendment actually entitled people to, which is
when I confirmed that the political playing field was equal in that every U.S. citizen was granted
the right to vote, regardless of sex. This led me to wonder if there was any empirical data to
show the effect of the 19​th​ amendment, so I viewed the results from the presidential election of
1920. Since the population of eligible voters had doubled since the previous presidential election,
there should’ve been a spike in voter turnout with half of the voters being women. Interestingly,
that wasn’t the case. My project idea was to find out why men and women weren’t evenly
represented in voting results and how women overcame the barriers that prevented them from
doing so.
While I was reading the Wikipedia page on the 19​th​ amendment, I found a very
interesting book in the references by J. Kevin Corder, titled “Counting Women’s Ballots.” This
book presented me with a multitude of barriers: race, literacy tests, and poll taxes. Poll taxes
interested me because it was something I had never heard of before. I quickly discovered that
poll taxes hindered African Americans in addition to restricting women’s right to vote. From
there, I wanted to find out how poll taxes were abolished because I had never heard of them,
which means that they had to have been abolished at some point. I discovered, in Encyclopedia
Virginia, that the 24​th​ amendment (ratified in 1964) and the supreme court case Harper v.
Virginia Board of Elections (1966). From this point, I searched for the origins of poll taxes.
Luckily, I found a thesis by Conley Lee Edwards, titled “A Political History of the Poll
Tax in Virginia, 1900-1950” that contextualizes the origins of poll taxes and how they were
fought. Most of my research stemmed from this thesis. From the thesis, I used Chronicling
America, Gale Virtual Reference Library, JSTOR,​ a​ nd other sources to conduct more in-depth
research.
To summarize, poll taxes were initially established in the late 19​th​ century to combat the
African American vote, but they also unintentionally stymied women’s ability to vote. Poll taxes
were used primarily in the south because that was where the highest concentration of African
Americans resided. The turn out of women voters didn’t equal that of men for several decades.