Woman Suffrage

• Author: Norma Basch
• Pages: 2917-2918

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When American women voted in the election of 1920, they did so for the first time as a constitutional right protected by the NINETEENTH AMENDMENT. The amendment's ratification marked the end of a long struggle that was bound

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up with both the shifting status of the ballot and the political development of a women's movement.

The struggle, which began formally at the women's rights convention at SENECA FALLS, New York, in 1848, emerged when most states had already dropped their property qualifications for white male voters. "Resolved," averred ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, "that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to elective franchise." Yet in the context of the mid-nineteenth century the right to elective franchise still was not a national, constitutional issue. Moreover, voting embodied so powerful a symbol of personal autonomy that granting it to women was profoundly controversial. In fact, woman suffrage, as contemporaries called it, barely won the support of the delegates at Seneca Falls.

RECONSTRUCTION transformed woman suffrage into a compelling constitutional issue. The second clause of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT introduced the word "male" into the Constitution, and the FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, which prohibited abridging the VOTING RIGHTS of black males, was silent on the disfranchisement of females. Inasmuch as the two amendments seemed at once essential to the rights of freedmen and inimical to the cause of woman suffrage, the women's movement divided over their ratification.

The spacious terms of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, sparked numerous challenges to women's disfranchisement. SUSAN B. ANTHONY created a dramatic test in the election of 1872 by registering and voting with fifteen other New York women, thereby violating a federal election statute, but her case did not reach the Supreme Court. The case that did was launched by Virginia Minor, who with her attorney-husband, Francis, sued the state of Missouri for restricting suffrage to males. The plaintiff's brief in MINOR V. HAPPERSETT (1875) argued that women had been empowered to vote in federal elections from the inception of the Constitution, had actually voted for a time in New Jersey, and were simply reaffirmed in their right to vote by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement of women, the brief asserted, was a BILL OF ATTAINDER, an infringement on...