Suffrage Reconstructed

In Suffrage Reconstructed Laura E. Free addresses a seemingly simple but utterly consequential matter: how the word male—the only explicit gender reference in the U.S. Constitution—became part of the Fourteenth Amendment. As such, the book engages works in women's and gender history, along with studies of the evolution of nineteenth-century democratic citizenship. In six crisply argued chapters, Free employs a fine-grained rhetorical analysis to dissect congressional debates over the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, demonstrating how those debates cemented into law a “perception of voting as a male privilege” (p. 142). While the inclusion of gendered language in section 2 of the amendment was by no means inevitable, Free argues, it emerged from established antebellum assumptions about the body politic, assumptions that shaped its reconstruction after emancipation. The role of woman suffrage advocates in the process forms a key theme of Free's argument. At the heart of Free's book is her careful explication of how the Fourteenth Amendment's framers crafted the second section, spending “far more time and energy on its language than they did on the language of the more enduring first section” (p. 5). But first she traces the emergence of an “imagined fraternity” of white male voters, as antebellum politicians lifted property qualifications for voting (and holding office), making gender the key requisite and rendering women's exclusion “so natural and necessary as to be self-evident” (pp. 82, 11). Free African American men claimed their right to the ballot by tapping into a “gender-based suffrage rhetoric” emphasizing “manhood,” while woman suffragists, in petitions and convention resolutions, stressed “gender-neutral principles of equality” (pp. 34, 44). When the Joint Committee on Reconstruction hammered out the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, Free convincingly demonstrates, Democrats and Republicans may have articulated different ideas about how to reinterpret—and rework—the nation's founding documents, but all envisioned voting as the privilege of a male citizenry. Yet it was not until Congress began receiving petitions demanding woman suffrage—twenty-three of them between January and March 1866—that members stopped “blithely ... imagining that universal suffrage applied only to men” and reworked their drafts of the amendment to add the word male three times (pp. 124–25). Feminists' use, in state referenda and constitutional conventions, of justice-based arguments to challenge women's exclusion got them nowhere. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's and Susan B. Anthony's infamous embrace of racist rhetoric and allies in the 1867 Kansas suffrage campaign followed. However unprincipled, theirs was not a mere flirtation, Free concludes, but “a strategic choice that seemed reasonable” given the “rhetorical norms” of “contemporary partisan political culture” (pp. 161, 135). It was a choice with fateful consequences

Body politic · Constitution · Democracy · Emancipation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suffrage · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society