Turning Rights into Ballots: The Uneven Integration of Women into Electoral Politics after Suffrage

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-483
Author(s):  
Christina Wolbrecht ◽  
J. Kevin Corder
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Women ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Right To Vote ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

After a more than seven-decade battle, American women secured the right to vote in August 1920. The struggle for women to have a voice in elections was not over, however. The Nineteenth Amendment states that “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.” The amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the law by appropriate legislation. It does not, however, empower or charge any government office or actor with ensuring that women can and do cast ballots. This article argues that this reality, often taken for granted, has serious implications for both the incorporation of women into the electorate and the representation of their political interests.

Jury Service and Women's Citizenship before and after the Nineteenth Amendment

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gretchen Ritter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Right ◽  
Equal Citizenship

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

The Government of the United States and American Foreign Missionaries

1912 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-85
Author(s):  
James Brown Scott ◽  
George F. Seward
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right

It is common knowledge that the United States was originally settled either by God-fearing men and women fleeing from persecution, or by political refugees who were unable to bring about reforms which they believed essential to good government and were unwilling to comply with the state of affaire existing in the Old World, or, finally, by those who, unfortunate at home, were desirous of bettering their condition in the New World. The Pilgrim and the Puritan, the Episcopalian and the Catholic, the Quaker, the Presbyterian and the Lutheran settled the Atlantic Coast. The roundhead and the cavalier, the rich and the poor and the inmate of the debtor’s prison found themselves side by side upon a plane of equality without the traditions and the conservatism of an older world. Whether the colony was composed of Puritans and manifested intolerance to the protestant brother of a different faith; whether the settlement remained loyal to the Church of England, as Virginia, or favored the Catholic, as Maryland, or freely accepted the law-abiding without questioning his religion, as the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the principle of religious toleration steadily gained ground, and by the time of the Revolution it may be said generally that religious differences ceased to influence men or their conduct toward each other, by virtue of a conception of liberty which embraced not merely the right to and protection of property but the freedom of thought, of speech and of public worship. The example of Virginia, which in 1786 established religious freedom by statute, profoundly influenced the Federal Government and the various States of the Union; for, by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, it is provided that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and the States of the American Union have, in their various Constitutions, placed the same restriction upon their legislatures. The amendment of the Constitution and the like provisions in State Constitutions were not dictated by indifference or hostility to the principles of the Christian religion, but aimed to prevent not merely the establishment of any one form of religion, however widely spread, but to establish upon a firm footing the right before the law of every religious sect.

The Issue of Parliamentary Suffrage at the Frankfurt National Assembly

1972 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Rose
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional Convention ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Political World ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
Right To Vote ◽  
The Right ◽  
Electoral Law

Universal suffrage is a commonplace in today's political world. In modern Western states it seems self-explanatory that there should be a general right to vote, or at least the pretense of such a right; and it is rather the exception to universal suffrage that requires explanation—at best as a quaint local peculiarity, at worst as a sign of pigheadedness or paranoia. In our era of bland populism, it is easy to forget the nineteenth century's passion over suffrage matters. But passion there was: from the sanscullottes of the 1790's to the suffragettes of the 1910's, no decade of the nineteenth century, no part of the Atlantic world was entirely free from this all-important question. Indeed suffrage issues erupted regularly whenever and wherever internal political tensions ran highest. Anti-Bourbon agitation in Restoration France, Chartist demands in England, Negro emancipation in the United States, demands for reform of Bismarckian Germany's Prussian heartland—these issues spanned the century, and they all contained at least some taint of the suffrage question. The European revolutions of 1848–49 came roughly at the mid-point of this century-long suffrage debate, and these revolutions too raised in various ways the issue of the right to vote. And one of the most interesting discussions of the franchise question came in February and March of 1849, when Germany's abortive constitutional convention, the Frankfurt National Assembly, turned its attention to an Electoral Law for the lower house of the projected national representative body.

Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law begins from the premise that the United States is neither postracial nor postcolonial. Using the lens of settler colonial theory, it attributes the origins and persistence of racialized inequities in the United States to the prerogatives asserted by its predominantly Angloamerican founders to appropriate Indigenous lands and resources, to profit from the labor of voluntary and involuntary migrants, and to ensure that all people of color remain “in their place.” This book assesses the experiences of American Indians, African Americans, Latina/os, and Asian Americans to the present day in terms of the strategies utilized by the settlers to accomplish these ends. By providing a functional analysis that links disparate forms of oppression, it makes the case for the oft-cited proposition that racial justice is indivisible, focusing particularly on the importance of acknowledging and contesting the continued colonization of Indigenous peoples and lands. It concludes that we will more effectively dismantle structural racism not by relying on promises of formal equality but by envisioning what the right of all peoples to self-determination means in a settler colonial state.

The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States

2001 ◽  
Vol 106 (4) ◽  
pp. 1342
Author(s):  
Ann D. Gordon ◽  
Alexander Keyssar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Right To Vote ◽  
The Right
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