Transcript

Updated, June 30, 2026. This podcast and its transcript have been revised from the original recording.

* * * *

Where, exactly, is the Constitution? That’s not as ridiculous a question as it sounds. I’ve asked a lot of people this, and gotten a lot of different answers. The vast majority are wrong, or at least partially wrong.  Think about it, we’ll get back to this.

In the meantime consider this: Are there any words in the U.S. Constitution that were written by women?  Since all the members of the Constitutional Convention were men, there’s little likelihood there, though I wouldn’t put it past Dolly Madison or Abigail Adams to have a go if the opportunity arose.  So if there are, they’d have to be in an amendment.  One amendment maybe, just maybe, was of female authorship. It came as part of a remarkable two-decade period when fundamental constitutional changes seemed almost commonplace; six amendments, the Sixteenth through the Twenty-First, were adopted from 1913 to 1933, from the authorization of income tax to direct election of senators, Prohibition and its repeal.  It’s only 39 words, but powerful words they are; opening one more door for greater participation in who gets to be part of deciding what the Constitution is – wherever it may be.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School.  Article V lays out the process of amending the Constitution, and it’s not easy; it requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress, plus ratification by three-quarters of the states, now typically with a deadline attached, which explains why only 27 have succeeded so far.

None of this has stopped people from trying; at time of recording at least 12,000 amendments have been proposed on topics grand and otherwise, often for show and nearly always dying in committee.  The last one to go to the states was in 1978, to grant the District of Columbia voting representation in Congress; it was ratified by 16 states before the clock ran out after 7 years.  The 1972 Equal Rights Amendment came closer – after its 7 year deadline was extended to 10, it came up 3 states short in 1982.  It keeps resurfacing, though, with lawsuits claiming the extension was illegal, others that the time limit was unconstitutional, some states rescinding ratification votes, others continuing to ratify all the way to Virginia in 2020 which would be the magic #38 except it isn’t.  And somehow, bizarrely, three days before leaving office is 2025, President Biden “declared” it to be ratified.  Uh huh.

“Voting”, such as it was, in eras of rule of by might, conquest, intimidation, the club or the fist or the will of gods, was almost exclusively the domain of men for the vast majority of human history.  The first more or less universal national action was by New Zealand in 1893.  It isn’t entirely clear if Susan B. Anthony wrote what would become the Nineteenth Amendment; some sources say yes, others say it was co-written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a few say somebody else or that nobody knows. 

This amendment was first introduced in 1878 with no success, as the movement for women’s voting rights globally was gaining momentum, if spottily – local, limited, partial, restricted to spinsters, widows, property owners and so on.  A number of U.S. states, largely in the West, passed referenda in the early 20^th century which re-energized the push for constitutional action.  It was reintroduced several times beginning in 1914, failed by one vote in the Senate in February of 1919 and then finally passed that June and sent to the states.  Ratification began almost immediately in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan within hours of each other.  A steady stream followed until #35, Washington, which wanted to hold out and be the clincher), but that left it one state short of the 36 needed, in March of a busy 1920, which saw the founding of the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and the NFL, the canonization of Joan of Arc, the 1^st commercial radio station, and the beginning of a number of doomed enterprises – Prohibition, the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the German Nazi party

That 36^th vote, somewhat surprisingly at the time, came from Tennessee. Contemporary news accounts from Nashville that week come across as a mixture of high political theater and screwball comedy. Several days of parliamentary chicanery and nail-biting drama, packed galleries, demonstrations, wearing of different colored roses pro and anti, with the Speaker of the Tennessee House firmly opposed, votes and countervotes and recounts and reconsideration motions and on and on; it does finally pass on August 18, when Republican Representative Henry Burn, aged 24, receives a note from his mother asking him to support it, and changes his vote; he later climbed out a window and hid in the state library’s attic following accusations of accepting bribery.  (His mom Febb was the first woman to register in her county, filling out a card with all male pronouns, and cast her first vote that November.)  Attempts to block the process, based on state constitutional concerns, didn’t work, 36 anti-suffrage legislators fled the state to deprive quorum – that sounds familiar, and it’s an old Tennessee legislator trick dating back to 1841– where they’re later found eating watermelon at a picnic in Alabama and plotting strategy.

That leaves the question of where, as in where did it go? Up until 1818 there was no actual process for the states to let anybody know they’d ratified an amendment. Article V doesn’t say, and it’s a sobering thought that the adoption of the Bill of Rights was a haphazard, make-do kind of affair, not entirely thoroughly documented.  (Don’t tell anybody.)  From 1818 to 1951, the Secretary of State was designated to receive these notices, so Governor Roberts of Tennessee signed a certification of the legislature’s action, dated August 24, 1920 (he wrote in the time, 10:17 a.m.), and off it went, by mail. 

More drama ensued in Washington, as the much-anticipated packet arrived at Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby’s house at about 3:45 on the morning of the 28^th; he consults with Federal attorneys on its validity and then, deciding it was unseemly to issue a proclamation in the middle of the night, waits until 8 a.m., after having a cup and a half of coffee. To the great annoyance of the suffrage movement, he does this in private, with no photographs, no motion picture cameras, and no women present, perhaps because so many rival organizations were jockeying for position for the big moment.  The ordinary steel pen he used to sign it is now in the Smithsonian. And just like that, in that moment, the vote was extended to over 22 million women, though as we know, more battles for voting rights and access still lie ahead.

Today, this whole process is housed in the National Archives.  When the Congress passes an amendment, it’s the Archivist of the United States who sends copies to the states and receives notification of their actions, examines those and then when the necessary number (now 38) are received, verifies that the amendment is valid and therefore part of the Constitution, rather prosaically printing that official notification in the Federal Register.  Finally, the records are added to the Archives’ collection for safekeeping.  That includes the amendment itself, in the form of a joint resolution of Congress, a single page signed by the Speaker of the House and Vice President as President of the Senate.  Even though the U.S. President has nothing at all to do with constitutional amending, that didn’t stop LBJ and Richard Nixon from horning in on certification ceremonies as superfluous “witnesses.” 

So, back where we started: where is the Constitution?

There are numerous documents, at the National Archives, that record and memorialize the stages of constitutional development, from the manuscript versions of the original and of the Bill of Rights, in large glass cases in the rotunda, to amendment resolutions and certifications, all kept safe and protected from physical degradation.  That’s what an archive does, what it’s for, specifically to keep and maintain the records of an organization, corporation, or government. 

Yes, fine, I hear you say, so where do they keep the real thing?  That’s the secret that really isn’t a secret – there isn’t one.  You could, theoretically, construct “the Constitution” from all those individual pieces, connecting up how it all happened and demonstrating the validity of each step, if anybody thought it was necessary.  However, there is no unique, tangible, singular, definitive “Constitution.”  The one you find in a textbook or web site somewhere, assuming it’s correct, is just as valid, just as useful, just as “authentic” as one sitting on the desk of the President or the Chief Justice.  I’m holding a little pamphlet version from the National Constitution Center in my hand right now.  So from a purely documentary perspective, the Constitution just is.  The text that underlies and undergirds the entire American system of law and society, doesn’t really exist.

Well, that’s not quite right; it’s more that it exists everywhere.  There doesn’t have to be a single authoritative version for it to work.  The overt public nature of all the processes renders that unnecessary; we all can see it happen, there’s nothing secret or hidden involved. Even though very few of us have ever seen these critical documents that together make up the Constitution, we know they’re there and can be produced, and that’s OK.  Lots of eyes keep it honest, and in this case, the whole really is the sum of the parts

In an era when there’s so little agreement, so little apparent common ground, the idea of new amendments that would require such a broad national consensus seems almost delusional. The most recent amendment, limiting Congressional pay raises, pales in comparison and scope, and it took over 200 years to ratify in 1992.  Though we often, passionately, disagree about what the words in the Constitution mean, we do agree on what they are, a testament to the power of documents, to provide certainty, and opportunity – for one and all.

Works cited

Brian P. Smentkowski & Michael Levy. “Nineteenth Amendment.” Encyclopedia Britannica.

David E. Kyvig. Explicit and Authentic Acts:  Amending the U. S. Constitution, 1776-1995. University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Eleanor Clift. Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment. Wiley, 2003.

“Equal Rights Amendment.” Wikipedia, 27 June 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Equal_Rights_Amendment&oldid=1361359944.

“Harry T. Burn.” Wikipedia, 19 Apr. 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harry_T._Burn&oldid=1349899059.

National Archives. Constitutional Amendment Process. http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/. Accessed 20 July 2012.

“Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Wikipedia, 7 June 2026. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution&oldid=1358314605#Ratification_timeline.

Pen Used to Sign the Ratification of the 19th Amendment, 1920 | Smithsonian Institution. https://www.si.edu/object/pen-used-sign-ratification-19th-amendment-1920%3Anmah_1423586. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Weatherford, Doris. A History of the American Suffragist Movement. ABC-CLIO, 1998. Library of Congress ISBN, http://www.librarything.com/work/3001983.