Two Amendments That Shifted Policy from A Focus on Just Capital to Capital and Labor

The 16th Amendment (1913) gave the federal government the capacity to raise modern revenues through an income tax; the 19th Amendment (1920) giving women the right to vote changed who politicians had to persuade about how that revenue should be used. 

There is strong evidence that women’s enfranchisement shifted policy priorities, increasing public spending on public health and education, strengthening child-labor restrictions, establishing minimum wages for women, and expanding aid for mothers and children. Granting women the right to vote did more than improve representation for women themselves; it amplified the political voice of those advocating for children and long-term human development.

In the late nineteenth century, public investment focused primarily on land and capital. By the early twentieth century, the government began to invest more deliberately in labor—in people—many of them children.