America's Forgotten Suffragists by Nicole Evelina

Author:Nicole Evelina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2022-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Because women were considered a special class of citizens—placing them below white men just as the Dred Scott case did with Black men—it meant that only a constitutional amendment could override the court’s decision. Just as “it took the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish the special category of slavehood for African-Americans by granting them citizenship . . . it finally took the Nineteenth Amendment to abolish in part the special category of citizenship for women by granting them the right to vote,”92 historian Joan Hoff writes in an analysis of the case.

Waite also clearly articulated that it was the states that defined which of their citizens could vote, not the federal government:

The Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one. . . . The Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of its citizens. For that definition we must look elsewhere. In this case we need not determine what they are, but only whether suffrage is necessarily one of them. . . . The United States has no voters in the States of its own creation. The elective officers of the United States are all elected directly or indirectly by State voters. . . . The power of the State in this particular is certainly supreme until Congress acts.93

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