U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony: 1873 - Supreme Court Reviews Women And The Fourteenth Amendment

In 1873, the Supreme Court heard the case of Myra Bradwell, who claimed that her Fourteenth Amendment rights were abridged by Illinois' law prohibiting women from the practice of law. The Court found that her rights had not been violated since "the right of females to pursue any lawful employment for a livelihood [the practice of law included]" was not "one of the privileges and immunities of women as citizens." Justice Samuel F. Miller, writing for the majority, explained: "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things."

In its decision on Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court's unanimous opinion was that the right of suffrage was not one of the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and women—although citizens of the United States—could be denied the vote by their respective states.

The first successful Fourteenth Amendment challenge to a sex-biased law was brought by Sally Reed in 1971. Reed's son died intestate (having made no valid will), and the Idaho court automatically appointed Reed's estranged husband Cecil as administrator of the estate, because of his sex, and denied Reed's own petition, because of hers. More than 100 years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger delivered the following opinion for the court: "We have concluded that the arbitrary preference established in favor of males by the Idaho Code cannot stand in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's command that no State deny the equal protection of the laws to any person within its jurisdiction."