Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
When the Nineteenth Amendment became law, it guaranteed the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex. However, it was not the same as women being allowed to vote. The Supreme Court case of Leser v. Garnett (1922), while not intended to do so, established this right. The plaintiffs challenged the Nineteenth Amendment as being unconstitutional. They argued first, that the amendment was invalid because it increased the electorate without the state of Maryland's consent. They argued secondly that ratification was based on several states that denied women the right to vote in their state constitutions and therefore their legislatures did not have the right to ratify the amendment. The third argument was that the last two states to ratify the amendment, Tennessee and West Virginia, violated their own rules of procedure.