About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 1 (January 13, 2023)

handle is hein.crs/govekfq0001 and id is 1 raw text is: \Congressional_______ Ra4esearch Service The Nineteenth Amendment and Women's Suffrage Part 3: The Reconstruction Era January 13, 2023 This Legal Sidebar is the third in a six-part series that discusses the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which recognized women's voting rights. Shortly before Election Day 2022, a group of people gathered in Rochester, New York, to honor the late social reformer and women's rights activist, Susan B. Anthony. About 150 years earlier, Anthony cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election. She was arrested and charged with illegally voting as a woman in violation of federal law. She unsuccessfully claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment gave her the right to vote as a privilege of citizenship. A federal district court imposed a fine of $100 on Anthony, but she never paid it. As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of Anthony's vote-and the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification- Congress may be interested in the history and impact of the women's suffrage movement and the Nineteenth Amendment. Additional information on this topic will be published in the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S Constitution. Shortly after the Civil War, Congress proposed three amendments to the Constitution, known as the Reconstruction Amendments, which aimed to safeguard African Americans' civil rights. These are the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, defining the concept of national citizenship and guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all persons; and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibiting the federal and state governments from restricting a U.S. citizen's eligibility to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The states' ratification of amendments that aimed to protect African Americans' civil rights brought new attention to issues of women's rights and suffrage. Debates over the Reconstruction Amendments led to disagreements within the women's suffrage movement. In particular, during congressional debates over the Fifteenth Amendment, the movement's leaders divided over whether to support an amendment that granted African American men the right to vote but did not address women's suffrage. Believing that the Constitution should not grant voting rights to African American men unless it also recognized women's suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony split from the American Equal Rights Association they founded in 1866 and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. NWSA focused its efforts on obtaining federal legislation or a constitutional amendment recognizing women's suffrage. Later in 1869, women's rights activists who supported the Fifteenth Amendment's adoption, including Lucy Stone, founded the Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10898 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most