Women's History Month 2020: Not Everyone Voted: Poll Taxes

Wikipedia Commons

Not everyone voted after the passage of the 19th amendment because voting wasn't as easy as just going to the polls. Poll taxes (as well as literacy tests) made it difficult to impossible for the poor (regardless of gender or race), women, and African Americans to vote. Now that shouldn't be interpreted to mean that poll taxes were invented in the 1900s, they actually have been around since America's early years. (You can read more about this in my GenealogyBank Blog post on Poll Taxes.) It's easy to understand that being required to pay in order to vote, if you have no money, is a deterrent.

It's also easy to see that a husband who doesn't want his wife to vote, may also not want to pay a poll tax for her to vote, if required.

According to the article Illusion of Suffrage: Female Voting Rights and the Women's Poll Tax Repeal Movement after the Nineteenth Amendment by Ronnie L Podolefsky, available here, "The Southern poll tax, a charge of one or two dollars required for registering to vote, resulted in the disproportionate disfranchisement of millions of women. Evidence shows that women were actively fighting the effects of the poll tax by 1922." 

The fight for suffrage didn't end the fight for women's rights, instead the fight took on other issues, including voting rights and the poll tax.

You can learn more about poll taxes in the place your ancestor lived by reading historical newspapers. You can find poll tax  records in places like FamilySearch.