Abstract

In the wake of the Civil War, women’s suffrage activists hoped that the U.S. Congress would meet their demand for enfranchisement. But not only did the Fourteenth Amendment, first introduced in 1865, leave that out, but it introduced an explicit mention of sex into the Constitution for the first time by referring to the rights of “male citizens.” When efforts to change the amendment’s language failed, some within the suffrage movement publicly opposed its ratification. Tensions mounted further when the Fifteenth Amendment—“the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged... on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—failed to...