Woman's Suffrage Act

On 18 February 1920 the Woman's Suffrage Act was presented and referred to the Senate. Ironically, a week earlier, the General Assembly had rejected the "proposed [nineteenth] amendment to the Constitution of the United States on woman suffrage." Other southern states, including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina also fought to keep women away from the polls.

With the founding of the Equal Suffrage League (ESL) of Virginia in 1909, a state-based group affiliated with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, women in the commonwealth began lobbying for the vote. Lila Meade Valentine served as the ESL's first president. The group worked tirelessly for a decade, struggling to debunk the argument made by anti-suffragists of the inevitability of "negro rule" that would result from women's suffrage. Those opposed to females gaining the vote feared that a combination of African American men, who gained the franchise through the Fifteenth Amendment, along with African American women voters would doom white supremacy. Valentine argued that white women were committed to maintaining the racial order, and, in reality, strict Jim Crow laws already kept many blacks away from the polls.

Virginia refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Despite this denial, the measure passed in thirty-six other states, legally giving Virginia women the right to vote. In 1952 the General Assembly officially adopted the amendment.