Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gretchen Ritter is Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance (1997)

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The Constitution as Social Design

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................ix1. The Constitution as Social Design...............................1PART I. THE IMPACT OF THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT2. Voting..........................................................333. Marriage........................................................664. Jury Service....................................................100PART II. WAR AND CIVIC MEMBERSHIP IN THE 1940S5. Labor...........................................................1356. War Service.....................................................174PART III. SECOND WAVE FEMINISM7. Equality........................................................2158. Privacy.........................................................2619. The Politics of Presence........................................297Notes..............................................................327Bibliography.......................................................341Index..............................................................367

Chapter One

A constitution not only constitutes a structure of power and authority, it constitutes a people in a certain way. It proposes a distinctive identity and envisions a form of politicalness for individuals in their new collective capacity. - Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past

Harriet Stanton Blatch was committed to woman suffrage. When her mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, passed away in 1902, Harriet returned from England to carry on her mother's work. Winning the vote became Harriet's full-time mission until the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted in 1920. The amendment was a personal as well as a political victory. It represented the fulfillment of a long-held family dream that American women would become full and equal citizens. Yet for Harriet, like her mother before her, the vote was merely a starting point in the campaign for true democracy. Reflecting on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, Blatch confided, "My mother could not conceive of suffrage as standing by itself, as an issue unrelated to other issues. For her it was inseparable from the antislavery agitation, from women's demand for entry into the Weld of labor, into the universities and professions" (DuBois, 1997, 226). Blatch was well aware that women's fight for equality did not end with the vote. Women's inclusion in the electorate did little to change their status of economic dependency. As wives, mothers, and workers, American women remained economically subordinate, and the political system was ill equipped to address the problems of industrial exploitation and legal discrimination that made them so.

By her eightieth birthday, in 1936, Blatch was still looking to the future: "The failures of a decade cannot shake my faith in democracy and liberty," she declared to the friends and family who had gathered in New York to celebrate with her. "I am here to represent the feminist side in this discussion of the future of democracy," she said (DuBois, 1997, 5). Blatch must have known when she passed away in 1940 that much remained to be done. Women still suffered legal discrimination. Even with the gains made during the New Deal, American social provisioning paled in comparison to the social policy regimes emerging in Western Europe. Under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American democracy was more vibrant than it had been when women first won the vote in 1920. Yet it seemed that there were limits on how much American democracy could expand. Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch had operated within a constitutional order which made the achievement of a more expansive, enriched democracy difficult.

This book is about the contribution that generations of feminists made to the promise of American democracy. It is also about the constitutional order that both constrained and inspired their democratic ambitions.

When did women achieve full civic membership in the Unites States? Was it in 1789, when the Constitution was adopted? Or was it in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment defined national citizenship for the first time? Was it in 1920, when women finally received the right to vote? Or in the 1960s and 1970s, when women were granted new rights in employment and education? Or, perhaps, did the failure to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s illustrate that women are still not recognized as full and equal members of the polity? The absence of a clear answer to this question is indicative of women's ambiguous place in the American civic order.

For much of the nation's history, women's presence in the community of "the People" was assumed but not specified. Before the twentieth century, women's place in the American political community was conceived of relationally. As wives, daughters, servants, and slaves, women were represented in public affairs through their husbands, fathers, and masters. They had no independent civic status. Then, in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, women gradually came to be seen as individuals. Individualism seems essential for civic recognition in America, a nation whose public philosophy is premised on liberalism and natural rights. American women's claim to an autonomous legal and political status has been hard-fought; in many ways they are still not fully recognized in those terms. Yet autonomy is not an unambiguously positive status for women. It remains uncertain what it would take for women to secure a civic membership that provides them with equal rights and status, and that is more fully expressive of their social identities, experiences, and concerns.

This book is about gender and civic membership in American constitutional politics, from the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment through second wave feminism. There are two central concerns that motivate this work. First, it examines how American civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior. Second, this book explores the dynamics of American constitutional development through a focus on civic membership, which is understood here as a legal and political construct at the heart of the constitutional order. In other words, this is a book about gender politics and constitutional development, and about what each of these can tell us about the other.

Within the American constitutional order women have undergone a shift from a civic status based upon marriage, family relations, and economic dependency to one based upon the principles of liberal individualism and legal personhood. Yet the attainment of a liberal civic status remains partial; in the struggle to achieve standing as public-realm individuals, women still face resistance to the idea that their sex does not matter to their civic membership. The federal government and many in the broader society will go only so far in granting women constitutional equality. Many prefer to think that it is appropriate for women to be recognized as relational beings, tied to their children and spouses, who are situated and shaped by their lives in the domestic realm.

The shift from a citizenship based on domesticity and dependency to one...