6.3: 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 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) to pursue them.

Whereas the Fifteenth Amendment struck down racial restrictions on voting in one fell swoop, women’s suffrage developed more gradually, state by state. Wyoming became the first state to allow women to vote when it joined the Union in 1890, its territorial legislature having already done so in 1869. Other states, predominantly in the west, followed suit. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment extended women’s suffrage nationwide in 1920, women already had full voting rights in 18 states and partial voting rights in 22 others.

A 1915 illustration in Puck magazine depicts women’s suffrage rising in the west and proceeding eastward.

After A 1915 illustration in Puck magazine depicts women’s suffrage rising in the west and proceeding eastward. the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the women’s rights movement in the United States lost some of its cohesion as its constituent groups pursued different policy agendas. It regained 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, prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving aid from the national government. Title IX continues to influence 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 than blacks of the rights in question.

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. Its opponents (including many women) argued that it would end certain legal protections enjoyed by women, such as their exemption from the military draft and their advantage in child custody hearings. This counter-mobilization succeeded: when the deadline to ratify the ERA arrived in 1982, only 35 of the required 38 states had done so, 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 use of birth control) from excessive government intrusion. The court did 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. Roe concerned a woman who had been unable to obtain an abortion in Texas and was challenging the state’s abortion ban. The court ruled that 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.