6.2: Sex

The postwar amendments targeted racial inequalities but dodged the question of equality between the sexes. Parts of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to “male citizens,” and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not on the basis of sex. However, a parallel civil rights movement to extend rights to women had already been percolating since before the Civil War. The first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, produced a list of political goals (including the right to vote) and laid the groundwork for future conventions and organizations (such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association) in pursuit of those goals.

Whereas the Fifteenth Amendment struck down racial restrictions on voting in one fell swoop, the movement for women’s suffrage began more gradually as a state-by-state campaign. Wyoming became the first state to allow women to vote when it joined the Union in 1890, its territorial legislature having already passed a law granting women suffrage in 1869. Other states, predominantly western ones, followed suit. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment made women’s voting rights a nationwide standard in 1920, women had already won full suffrage in 18 states and partial suffrage in 22 others.

The cover of the program for the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Procession depicts women advancing on the U.S. Capitol to press their case for voting rights.

After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the women’s rights movement in the United States lost some of its cohesiveness as its constituent groups pursued different policy agendas. It regained its strength in the 1960s and converged with the movement for racial equality to push for the Civil Rights Act, which forbade employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race. Eight years later, Congress enacted Title IX, which prohibited sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal aid. Title IX continues to influence many aspects of education today, from the balance of men’s and women’s college sports to the handling of accusations of sexual harassment on campus.

Though the movements for racial and sexual equality in the United States share many similarities, the two have not always been allied. Some anti-slavery organizations excluded women from their activities, and some women’s rights organizations did the same to blacks. Certain women’s rights groups also opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments on the basis that they did not extend to women, whom they considered more deserving of the rights in question than blacks were.

In the same year Title IX was enacted, Congress also passed the Equal Rights Amendment, designed as a comprehensive statement of sexual equality that would have eliminated virtually all legal distinctions between men and women. As a proposed constitutional amendment, the ERA required ratification by three-fourths of the states. Opponents of the ERA (including many women) argued that it would end certain legal protections enjoyed by women, such as their exemption from being drafted into the military and their advantage in child custody hearings. This counter-mobilization was successful: when the deadline to ratify the ERA arrived in 1982, only 35 of the required 38 states had ratified it, and three of those had already rescinded their ratifications.

A particularly controversial area of women’s rights — one that is sometimes classified as a civil liberties issue and other times as a civil rights issue — concerns sexual activity. In the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning contraceptives on the basis that the Constitution contains a right to privacy, which protects intimate personal activities — including the decision to use birth control — from excessive government intrusion. The court could not identify an explicit statement of a right to privacy in the Constitution; instead, it ruled that such a right could be inferred from parts of the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth amendments.

The right to privacy was again invoked eight years later in 1973, when the Supreme Court heard the landmark case Roe v. Wade, involving a woman who had been unable to obtain an abortion in Texas and was challenging the state’s abortion ban. The court ruled that the right to an abortion was a fundamental component of the right to privacy and declared abortion bans unconstitutional. This was a major turning point in the decades-long debate between “pro-life” advocates who argued that the life of an unborn child outweighed the freedom of a woman to make her own reproductive decisions and “pro-choice” advocates who argued the opposite. In 2022, the court determined in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that Roe was wrongly decided, overturning it and sending control of abortion policy back to the states.