On Aug. 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state needed for passage of the 19th Amendment.

That means without the help of the men in the Tennessee General Assembly women would not have the rights we have today.

It took a half a century for the 19th Amendment to be passed. Women of all kinds worked together over the course of the movement to fight for the right to vote.

Various states and cities granted the right, but it wasn't until State Rep. Harry Burns was persuaded by his mother to vote in favor of the amendment. The 24-year-old Republican said he supported women's suffrage as a "moral right," and had voted against it because he believed his constituents opposed it. In the final minutes before the vote, he received a note from his mother, urging him to vote yes.

A century later that milestone was recognized and celebrated in a number of ways in Tennessee. There were gatherings and a (very short) parade at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville.

Before that day, women had to rely on men to vote in their best interests. You can guess how that went most of the time.

Sixth Circuit Senior Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey put the importance of the 19th Amendment in context, discussing the extent to which women were second-class citizens under the law for a substantial portion of the country’s history.

"Marriage makes two people into one, and it turns out the one was the husband and not the wife," she said. "The husband literally had custody of his wife’s person and her property. He had exclusive control and guardianship of any children, and you have to remember that this means if a woman decided for her safety or her happiness that she needed to leave her marital home she had to leave the children behind. The husband had the absolute right to any money she earned. It really was a situation where she almost had no existence at all beyond the house."

Women's rights activists pushed for changes to these oppressive laws in the last half of the 1800s and joined together to draw attention to injustice at the Seneca Falls Convention and countless other gatherings. But it was another 72 years between Seneca Falls and the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

"It turns out that when ratification was finally achieved there was only one person still alive who had been at Seneca Falls," Daughtrey said.

But not all women were afforded the same opportunities.

"Even though women got the right to vote in 1920 we have to remember that for the most part it would take until 1965 until African Americans could vote" in the South, explained Linda T. Wynn, the assistant director for state programs with the Tennessee Historical Commission and a history and political science lecturer at Fisk University. That was the year that the Voting Rights Act was passed.

For those wanting to learn more about the significance of the 19th Amendment and Tennessee's important role in its passage, the Tennessee State Museum has a virtual exhibit that details every in the state. It also has "Ratified! Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote," an in-person exibit that opened July 31 and runs through March 2021.