Appellant
Virginia Minor (with Francis Minor, her husband, as required by Missouri law,which did not permit married women to bring suit on their own)
Appellee
Reese Happersett
Appellant's Claim
That Virginia Minor's constitutional rights were violated by Happersett's refusal to register her to vote in the election of 1872.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Francis Minor, John M. Rum, John B. Henderson
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
No opposing counsel
Justices for the Court
Joseph P. Bradley, Nathan Clifford, David Davis, Stephen Johnson Field, WardHunt, Samuel Freeman Miller, William Strong, Noah Haynes Swayne, Morrison Remick Waite (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
29 March 1875
Decision
The Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee Virginia Minor's right to vote, although she was found to be a citizen of the United States.
Significance
This case marked the second time in two years that the Supreme Court declinedto extend Fourteenth Amendment protection to women's rights. Suffrage, the specific "privilege of citizenship" denied in the case, would not be obtainedby women nationwide until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
As Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor pointed out, the adoption of theFourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868 "introduced sex-specific language into the Constitution: Section 2 of the Amendment, which dealt with the legislative representation and voting, said that if the right to votewere `denied to any of the male inhabitants' of a state aged twenty-one or over [emphasis O'Connor's] then the proportional representation in thatstate would be reduced accordingly."
Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution referred to the presidentas "he" but to all other Americans as "citizens" and "persons," without reference to their gender. But the Fourteenth Amendment's "sex-specific language"in section 2 excluded women and raised questions about women's citizenship.For this reason, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other nineteenth-century women's rights activists fiercely opposed its adoption. (Lucy Stone and other women suffragists reluctantly supported black male suffrage, regardless of the perceived cost to women.)
The "New Departure"
After the amendment's ratification and adoption, attorney Francis Minor--husband of Virginia Minor, the president of the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri--argued that its section 1 was actually an advance for women. Section 1of the Fourteenth Amendment states:
Minor drafted resolutions explaining his view that the Constitution, as amended by the Fourteenth Amendment, now guaranteed the right of suffrage to women:
Missouri's Woman Suffrage Association endorsed Francis Minor's resolutions, and by the end of 1869, they had been endorsed by the National Woman SuffrageAssociation. Stanton and Anthony published them in their newspaper Revolution, and at least 150 women in ten states chose to act on them.
They turned out to vote in the 1871 and 1872 elections. Some, including Anthony, were prosecuted for successfully voting; others, like Virginia Minor, sued their states or voting officials for turning them away. The Minor case eventually reached the Supreme Court.
A Constitutional Approach
In their petition filed in December of 1872, Virginia Minor's attorneys argued her constitutional rights had been abridged. They cited Article I, section9, that no bill of attainder shall be passed; Article I, section 10, prohibiting states from passing bills of attainder or "any title of nobility--a status that `male citizens' seemed to have been awarded; Article IV, section 2, which gave citizens of the states privileges and immunities of citizens in allof the States"; Article IV, section 4, guaranteeing to every state a republican form of government and the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that "no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
They also cited the Ninth Amendment, which reserves to the people any rightsnot expressly granted to the government. The last amendment cited was the Fourteenth Amendment, section 1, using the same resolutions Minor had thought out back in 1869.
Reese Happersett's attorney maintained that "the defendant was justified in refusing to register the plaintiff on account of her sex." Both the Circuit Court of St. Louis and the Supreme Court of Missouri agreed. Both courts acquitted Happersett and upheld Missouri's denial of suffrage to women.
All or Nothing
Plaintiffs' argument and briefs presented to the Supreme Court repeated points made before the lower courts and also contained a new claim: "There can beno half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen of the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, orto none." They cited several previous Supreme Court decisions, including Scott v. Sandford, the infamous judicial reply to the question of whether"the class of persons who had been imported as slaves [or] their descendants. . . free or not," were or ever could be citizens. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney had written in the majority opinion that they could not (a decision later invalidated by the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment), but hestressed that a finding of citizenship would have conferred rights no statecould abridge:
Pointing out that section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to women as well as to the black males, plaintiffs' attorneys argued that bothgroups, by the standards set in Dred Scott, were now guaranteed a citizen's "privileges and immunities." They next cited the Supreme Court's 1873Slaughterhouse decision as evidence that suffrage was one of the rights of citizenship: "The Negro having by the Fourteenth Amendment been declareda citizen of the United States is thus made a voter in every state of the Union." Therefore, they reasoned, a state's abridgment of its female citizen'sright of suffrage was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Unanimously, however, the Supreme Court found otherwise. Chief Justice Waitewrote in the majority opinion that women born or naturalized in the United States were in fact--and had been even prior to the adoption of the FourteenthAmendment--citizens of the United States. He found, however, that the right of suffrage was not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and that the states were entitled to exclude women from the polls. It would take nearly a century before the Supreme Court would apply Fourteenth Amendment protection to women's rights.
Related Cases
The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, is the most prominent of the three Aamendments designed to secure the civil rights of the millions of slaves freed during the Civil War. Indeed, the Fourteenth is one of the most important of all constitutional amendments, and has been the case of more legal action--and more discussion by legal scholars--than any other part of the Constitution.
Most of the attention centers on the first of the amendment's five sections.Section 1 extends the rights to due process and equal protection under the law, first applied to the federal government in the Fifth Amendment, to the states. This was a revolutionary step, because it was primarily under state governments that citizens' civil rights were being violated.
The other four sections of the amendment relate chiefly to situations prevailing at the time, and have enjoyed considerably less attention than section 1in years since. Thus for instance section 3 denies the opportunity of servicein Congress or as president or vice president to anyone who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against" the federal government--i.e. in the Confederacy. Likewise section 4 validates the debt incurred by the federal government during the war, but invalidates that incurred by the Confederate government.
Sources
West's Encyclopedia of American Law. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1998.
Virginia Minor (with Francis Minor, her husband, as required by Missouri law,which did not permit married women to bring suit on their own)
Appellee
Reese Happersett
Appellant's Claim
That Virginia Minor's constitutional rights were violated by Happersett's refusal to register her to vote in the election of 1872.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Francis Minor, John M. Rum, John B. Henderson
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
No opposing counsel
Justices for the Court
Joseph P. Bradley, Nathan Clifford, David Davis, Stephen Johnson Field, WardHunt, Samuel Freeman Miller, William Strong, Noah Haynes Swayne, Morrison Remick Waite (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
29 March 1875
Decision
The Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee Virginia Minor's right to vote, although she was found to be a citizen of the United States.
Significance
This case marked the second time in two years that the Supreme Court declinedto extend Fourteenth Amendment protection to women's rights. Suffrage, the specific "privilege of citizenship" denied in the case, would not be obtainedby women nationwide until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
As Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor pointed out, the adoption of theFourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868 "introduced sex-specific language into the Constitution: Section 2 of the Amendment, which dealt with the legislative representation and voting, said that if the right to votewere `denied to any of the male inhabitants' of a state aged twenty-one or over [emphasis O'Connor's] then the proportional representation in thatstate would be reduced accordingly."
Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution referred to the presidentas "he" but to all other Americans as "citizens" and "persons," without reference to their gender. But the Fourteenth Amendment's "sex-specific language"in section 2 excluded women and raised questions about women's citizenship.For this reason, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other nineteenth-century women's rights activists fiercely opposed its adoption. (Lucy Stone and other women suffragists reluctantly supported black male suffrage, regardless of the perceived cost to women.)
The "New Departure"
After the amendment's ratification and adoption, attorney Francis Minor--husband of Virginia Minor, the president of the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri--argued that its section 1 was actually an advance for women. Section 1of the Fourteenth Amendment states:
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 shallmake 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.
Minor drafted resolutions explaining his view that the Constitution, as amended by the Fourteenth Amendment, now guaranteed the right of suffrage to women:
Resolved, 1: That the immunities and privileges of American citizenship, however defined, are National in character and paramount to all State authority.
2: That while the Constitution of the United States leaves the qualifications of electors to the several States, it nowhere gives them the right to deprive any citizen of the elective franchise which is possessed by anyother citizen--to regulate, not including the right to prohibit the franchise.
3: That, as the Constitution of the United States expressly declares that no State shall make or enforce any laws that shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, those provisions of theseveral State Constitutions that exclude women from the franchise on accountof sex, are violative alike of the spirit and letter of the Federal Constitution.
4: That, as the subject of naturalization is expressly withheld from the States, and as the States clearly have no right to deprive of the franchise naturalized citizens, among whom women are expressly included, still more clearly they have no right to deprive native-born women of this right.
Missouri's Woman Suffrage Association endorsed Francis Minor's resolutions, and by the end of 1869, they had been endorsed by the National Woman SuffrageAssociation. Stanton and Anthony published them in their newspaper Revolution, and at least 150 women in ten states chose to act on them.
They turned out to vote in the 1871 and 1872 elections. Some, including Anthony, were prosecuted for successfully voting; others, like Virginia Minor, sued their states or voting officials for turning them away. The Minor case eventually reached the Supreme Court.
A Constitutional Approach
In their petition filed in December of 1872, Virginia Minor's attorneys argued her constitutional rights had been abridged. They cited Article I, section9, that no bill of attainder shall be passed; Article I, section 10, prohibiting states from passing bills of attainder or "any title of nobility--a status that `male citizens' seemed to have been awarded; Article IV, section 2, which gave citizens of the states privileges and immunities of citizens in allof the States"; Article IV, section 4, guaranteeing to every state a republican form of government and the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that "no person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."
They also cited the Ninth Amendment, which reserves to the people any rightsnot expressly granted to the government. The last amendment cited was the Fourteenth Amendment, section 1, using the same resolutions Minor had thought out back in 1869.
Reese Happersett's attorney maintained that "the defendant was justified in refusing to register the plaintiff on account of her sex." Both the Circuit Court of St. Louis and the Supreme Court of Missouri agreed. Both courts acquitted Happersett and upheld Missouri's denial of suffrage to women.
All or Nothing
Plaintiffs' argument and briefs presented to the Supreme Court repeated points made before the lower courts and also contained a new claim: "There can beno half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen of the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, orto none." They cited several previous Supreme Court decisions, including Scott v. Sandford, the infamous judicial reply to the question of whether"the class of persons who had been imported as slaves [or] their descendants. . . free or not," were or ever could be citizens. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney had written in the majority opinion that they could not (a decision later invalidated by the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment), but hestressed that a finding of citizenship would have conferred rights no statecould abridge:
If persons of the African race are citizens of a State, and of the United States, they would be entitled to all of these privileges and immunities in every State, and the State could not restrict them; for they would hold these privileges and immunities under the paramount authority of the Federal Government, and its courts would be bound to maintain and enforce them, the Constitution [of an individual state] and the laws of the State to the contrary notwithstanding . . .
Pointing out that section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to women as well as to the black males, plaintiffs' attorneys argued that bothgroups, by the standards set in Dred Scott, were now guaranteed a citizen's "privileges and immunities." They next cited the Supreme Court's 1873Slaughterhouse decision as evidence that suffrage was one of the rights of citizenship: "The Negro having by the Fourteenth Amendment been declareda citizen of the United States is thus made a voter in every state of the Union." Therefore, they reasoned, a state's abridgment of its female citizen'sright of suffrage was a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Unanimously, however, the Supreme Court found otherwise. Chief Justice Waitewrote in the majority opinion that women born or naturalized in the United States were in fact--and had been even prior to the adoption of the FourteenthAmendment--citizens of the United States. He found, however, that the right of suffrage was not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and that the states were entitled to exclude women from the polls. It would take nearly a century before the Supreme Court would apply Fourteenth Amendment protection to women's rights.
Related Cases
- Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 293 (1857).
- Slaughterhouse Cases, 16 U.S. 36 (1873).
- U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony 24 F.Cas. 829 (1873).
The Fourteenth Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, is the most prominent of the three Aamendments designed to secure the civil rights of the millions of slaves freed during the Civil War. Indeed, the Fourteenth is one of the most important of all constitutional amendments, and has been the case of more legal action--and more discussion by legal scholars--than any other part of the Constitution.
Most of the attention centers on the first of the amendment's five sections.Section 1 extends the rights to due process and equal protection under the law, first applied to the federal government in the Fifth Amendment, to the states. This was a revolutionary step, because it was primarily under state governments that citizens' civil rights were being violated.
The other four sections of the amendment relate chiefly to situations prevailing at the time, and have enjoyed considerably less attention than section 1in years since. Thus for instance section 3 denies the opportunity of servicein Congress or as president or vice president to anyone who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against" the federal government--i.e. in the Confederacy. Likewise section 4 validates the debt incurred by the federal government during the war, but invalidates that incurred by the Confederate government.
Sources
West's Encyclopedia of American Law. St. Paul, MN: West Group, 1998.
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