This Legal Sidebar is the second in a six-part series that discusses the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which recognized women's voting rights. Shortly before Election Day 2022, a group of people gathered in Rochester, New York, to honor the late social reformer and women's rights activist, Susan B. Anthony. About 150 years earlier, Anthony cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election. She was arrested and charged with illegally voting as a woman in violation of federal law. She unsuccessfully claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the right to vote as a privilege of citizenship. A federal district court imposed a fine of $100 on Anthony, but she never paid it. As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of Anthony's vote—and the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification—Congress may be interested in the history and impact of the women's suffrage movement and the Nineteenth Amendment. Additional information on this topic will be published in the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.
As proposed and ratified by men in the late 1780s, the Constitution did not prohibit the states from establishing gender-based restrictions on voting. From the Founding of the United States in 1776 to the end of the Civil War in 1865, none of the states consistently recognized a woman's right to vote in federal or state elections. Several state constitutions in existence at the time of the Founding specifically limited suffrage to men. Many women faced additional barriers to voting because of "coverture," a legal doctrine derived from English common law. Coverture denied a married woman a separate legal status from her husband, thereby preventing her from voting.
Although women could not vote in the early 1800s, they actively led and participated in political reform movements. Female activists, many of whom advocated for the abolition of slavery, increasingly wrote and gave speeches in support of women's suffrage. In 1848, two of these activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organized a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women's rights.
At this convention of a few hundred women and men, Stanton presented her Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled after the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Stanton's Declaration stated that "all men and women are created equal." The Declaration listed various grievances against the government and the system of coverture, including the denial of women's "inalienable right to the elective franchise." One hundred convention attendees signed the Declaration, including Stanton, Mott, and African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Convention attendees also narrowly passed a separate resolution calling for women's suffrage.
After the Seneca Falls Convention, women and men organized other conventions throughout the United States to advocate for women's rights, including suffrage. During the 1850s, some formerly enslaved African American women, who faced barriers to voting because of race and gender, organized and attended conventions advocating for women's suffrage. These women included Sojourner Truth and Sarah Redmond. As a result of these efforts, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the campaign for women's suffrage attained broader public awareness and support.
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