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Home , Universal suffrage

Law Day CLE 2020: Women’s , the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Duality of a Movement

Danielle M. Conway Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law The Role of the American Lawyer: Past, Present, Future

• Defend the

• Promote the Rule of Law

• Protect the Most Vulnerable Justifying and Human Hierarchy

Led by John Cotton, a Puritan minister who drafted New ’s first constitution in 1636, Puritan colonists agreed with his pronouncements that legalized the enslavement of captives . . . and strangers willing to sell themselves or who were sold into slavery. Puritans believing themselves superior to African Peoples held these ideals prior to making settlement in America. It was a fait accompli to conflate these judgments with the unnatural act of slavery. The practice of enslavement of African Peoples in America dates to 1619. • American colonies embrace a new principle of Government, sloughing off • taxation without representation and • any virtual representation of themselves by those in British Parliament.

• Having rebelled against British rule over white men, the latter in 1690 hypocritically adopted Telling slave codes making slavery official throughout the American colonies, thereby cementing American History and white men as the new patriarch through the establishment of, among other principles, “ Herstory as a privilege of the few, not a right of all.”

• The United States Constitution embodied new ideas about Government “by the people,” with power divided between the states and the national government. In 1791, the United States Constitution was expanded by the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments securing for individuals— white men—guarantees of personal . • Again, in stark contrast to the Founding American principles of and freedom, Congress in 1820 entered into the Missouri Compromise, allowing states to choose their own course to pursue or not the continued enslavement of human beings.

• In the 1820s and America continued Telling westward expansion and propertied white men secured political power by extending the voting History and franchise to include all white men. Herstory, • At the same time African American slaves, black free men, women, and American First Peoples cont’d were either enslaved, disenfranchised, subordinated, and/or corralled and removed by violence, threat of violence, and/or intimidation perpetrated by white men. To consolidate even more power, white men rewrote state , stripping away whatever rights existed in non-whites and significant numbers of women. • Between 1850 and the start of the Civil War, America became fractured and divided by the defense of slavery, an unnatural act that threatened the Union.

• In 1860 Southern states seceded from the Telling Union. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president and took an oath to preserve the History and Union. Herstory, • The bloody Civil War ensued, with Lincoln on one side aiming to keep the Union intact by cont’d putting down southern states’ insurrection, while on the other side, the southern states fought--not to end the Union--but to preserve slavery, in essence to preserve the liberty to own human beings. Representative Political Interests Within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1837-1865

Abolitionists Suffragists Women Suffragists Anti-slavery agitation Anti-slavery agitation Anti-slavery agitation Abolish Slavery Abolish Slavery Abolish slavery Black Male Suffrage - ’s right to act on political incrementalism questions – the right to be heard on the issue of slavery and the rebuke of racial Women’s rights agitations Universal Suffrage Interest CONVERGENCE Between Anti- Slavery and Women’s Suffrage Movements

Abolitionism • Proclaimed slavery to be morally and politically evil • Bound together an interracial alliance in the North to fight against slavery • Supported the ratification of the 13th Amendment • Created an antebellum bond between nascent feminists and early civil rights activists • SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary Ratification of the servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly Reconstruction convicted, shall exist within the United States, Amendments: or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Thirteenth Amendment • SECTION 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. • SECTION 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

• SECTION 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the Ratification of the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the Reconstruction whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any for the choice of Amendments: electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Fourteenth Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any Amendment of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. . . .

• SECTION 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments: Fifteenth Amendment

• SECTION 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• SECTION 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Interest DIVERGENCE Among Suffragists Post-Civil War and Reconstruction

Women Suffrage First Universal Suffrage • Post Civil War, the position taken • Political rights and political by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth equality for all Cady Stanton exposed and • More African American Women affiliated with suffragists who • Opposition to the 15th Amendment supported the 15th Amendment • Challenge the 14th Amendment by • Focus on state legislatures to attempting to vote obtain women’s suffrage • In the South, women suffrage • Revitalized the fight against advocates trended to “educated Southern suffrage” and “Women first and negro last” sentiment JIM CROW and Sharp Divisions Between Women Suffragists and Universal Suffragists, 1865-1920

Jim Crow laws started to come into effect, primarily but not exclusively in southern states, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The legal principle of separate but equal was established in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895. The Court's decision was summarized by Chief Justice Henry Billings Brown, who stated that the 14th Amendment's "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." That distinction of social, as opposed to strictly legal, , provided the foundation for states to keep black and separated, particularly in social settings and social institutions such as marriage. The convenient fiction of "separate but equal" was quickly abandoned and were treated as second-class citizens by institutions and laws that persist to this day. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment African-American Women as Symbols of the Universal Suffrage Movement

• Universal Suffrage: Unrestricted and equal voting rights for men and women. • Despite the slow expansion of voter rolls through the 18th and 19th centuries, it wasn't until 1919 that universal women's suffrage would be guaranteed and protected by a constitutional amendment. It wasn't until the mid- 1960s, after years of peaceful marches and brutal violence, that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would truly extend the franchise to all African- Americans. It wasn't until 1971 that the 26th Amendment would allow 18-year- olds to vote. • Despite the hard-earned wins, state legislatures across the country have been cracking down on the fallacious specter of voter fraud with a volley of voter-identification laws that are expected to disproportionately suppress turnout of minority voters. D.W. Blight, Frederick M.J. & P. Buhle, The Concise BOOKS Douglass: Prophet of History of Woman Suffrage Freedom

P. Giddings, When and A.D. Gordon, African- Where I Enter: The Impact of b. hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: American Women And The Black Women on Race and Vote 1837-1965 Black Women & Sex in America

Select I.X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive N. I.Painter, The History of A. Lorde, Sister Outsider History of Racist Ideas in White People Bibliography America

G. Chin, The “Voting Rights R. Terborg-Penn, African- Act of 1867:” The American Women in the LAW REVIEW ARTICLES Constitutionality of Federal Struggle for the Vote, 1850- Regulation of Suffrage 1920 During Reconstruction

R. Hasen & L. Litman, Thick N.S. Siegel, Why the Reva B. Siegel, The and Thin Conceptions of the Nineteenth Amendment Nineteenth Amendment and Nineteenth Amendment Matters Today: A Guide for the Democratization of the Right to Vote and Congress’s the Centennial Family Power to Enforce It