WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

[Draggingtree]

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

by Professor Kris Kobach (Univ. of Missouri-K. C.)

(The following is an excerpt from "Rethinking Article V: Term Limits and the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Amendments,"

103 Yale Law Journal (1994

 

Just as the curtain was closing on the struggle for the Seventeenth Amendment, the suffragist movement was starting to gain momentum on the same path of transformation. Like the former, the latter campaign began many decades before the constitutional amendment was achieved. It originated at a meeting on July 19-20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. The participants drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments" protesting the political, social, and economic inferiority of women. The Declaration also included the first public demand for extending the franchise to women. It was the first of many such conventions in the nascent women's rights movement, and virtually all of the activists in the cause were abolitionists as well. 39 The Civil War and the subsequent amendments to the Constitution brought an extended hiatus to the woman suffrage movement, as national attention was focused on the abolition of slavery and the extension of political rights to African-Americans. Suffragists were unable to tie their cause to the racial issue and failed in an attempt to prevent the enfranchisement of African-Americans without the granting of the same rights to women. However, the passage of the Civil War Amendments did further the suffragist cause in one sense: it defined an objective for the movement that had previously seemed unattainable-an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.40

Accordingly, in January 1878, suffragists persuaded Senator A.A. Sargent of California to introduce a suffrage amendment in Congress. However, Read More

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