Women of the Constitution follows in the footsteps of the 1912 work devoted to biographical sketches of the spouses of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. This book will be the first work devoted exclusively to providing brief biographies of the forty-three wives o...

That a constitution should express the will of 'the people' is a long-standing principle, but the identity of 'the people' has historically been narrow. Women, in particular, were not included. A shift, however, has recently occurred. Women's participation in constitution-making is now recognised as a democratic right. Women's demands to have their voices heard in both the processes of constitution-making and the text of their country's constitution, are gaining recognition. Campaigning for inclusion in their country's constitution-making, women have adopted innovative strategies to express their constitutional aspirations. This collection offers, for the first time, comprehensive case studies of women's campaigns for constitutional equality in nine different countries that have undergone constitutional transformations in the 'participatory era'. Against a richly-contextualised historical and political background, each charts the actions and strategies of women participants, both formal and informal, and records their successes, failures and continuing hopes for constitutional equality.

In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," and ends in the present, when men and women still have different obligations to serve in the armed forces.

The legacy of women's roles in the development of our country and our Constitution has largely been ignored by historians and educators--until now. Informative and enlightening, Women, Politics and the Constitution is one of the few books that recognizes and provides an understanding of women's early political contributions. It is an absolutely essential volume for an educated public. Experts, both women and men, debate, discuss, and commemorate the significance of the United States Constitution on women's history, rights, and present status. Chapters are written by legal and academic leaders who are playing a critical role both in interpreting and in determining the constitutional status of women. Highlights include: an overview of the history of women and the United States constitution by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who explores the exclusion of women from most political and economic protections provided to men and addresses the impact on women of various interpretations made by the United States Supreme Court a review of one pioneering woman's contributions to the content of the Constitution a discussion of the implications of the Constitution for African-American women an examination of how New Jersey women secured the right to vote in the late eighteenth century and their subsequent disenfranchisement an investigation of the significance of the Nineteenth Amendment for contemporary gender gap politics a look at sex discrimination cases decided by the Burger Court--both before and after the appointment of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor--to determine her impact on the Court as a whole and upon individual justices criticism of the Supreme Court's approach to constitutional gender equality, with suggestions for a new type of review for gender-based classifications under the Equal Protection Clause an exploration of the theoretical foundations of American sex discrimination law an examination of the content and success rate of constitutional changes relating to women's issues that were proposed in the 50 states between 1977 and 1985 Women, Politics and the Constitution is an outgrowth of the conference Women and the Constitution: A Bicentennial Perspective which was held recently in Atlanta, Georgia, and was sponsored by the Carter Center of Emory University, the Jimmy Carter Library, and Georgia State University.

As a result, American women played a peripheral role in constitutional history until 1920. This pamphlet looks at this role as it developed throughout the nineteenth-century, culminating in 1920 with the passing of the women's sufferage amendment in 1920.

In this remarkable study, David A. J. Richards combines an interpretive history of culture and law, political philosophy, and constitutional analysis to explain the background, development, and growing impact of two of the most important and challenging human rights movements of our time, feminism and gay rights. Richards argues that both movements are extensions of rights-based dissent, rooted in antebellum abolitionist feminism that condemned both American racism and sexism. He sees the progressive role of such radical dissent as an emancipated moral voice in the American constitutional tradition. He examines the role of dissident African Americans, Jews, women, and homosexuals in forging alternative visions of rights-based democracy. He also draws special attention to Walt Whitman's visionary poetry, showing how it made space for the silenced and subjugated voices of homosexuals in public and private culture. According to Richards, contemporary feminism rediscovers and elaborates this earlier tradition. And, similarly, the movement for gay rights builds upon an interpretation of abolitionist feminism developed by Whitman in his defense, both in poetry and prose, of love between men. Richards explores Whitman's impact on pro-gay advocates, including John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and André Gide. He also discusses other diverse writers and reformers such as Margaret Sanger, Franz Boas, Elizabeth Stanton, W. E. B. DuBois, and Adrienne Rich. Richards addresses current controversies such as the exclusion of homosexuals from the military and from the right to marriage and concludes with a powerful defense of the struggle for such constitutional rights in terms of the principles of rights-based feminism.

Women and the U.S. Constitution is about much more than the nineteenth amendment. This provocative volume incorporates law, history, political theory, and philosophy to analyze the U.S. Constitution as a whole in relation to the rights and fate of women. Divided into three parts—History, Interpretation, and Practice—this book views the Constitution as a living document, struggling to free itself from the weight of a two-hundred-year-old past and capable of evolving to include women and their concerns. Feminism lacks both a constitutional theory as well as a clearly defined theory of political legitimacy within the framework of democracy. The scholars included here take significant and crucial steps toward these theories. In addition to constitutional issues such as federalism, gender discrimination, basic rights, privacy, and abortion, Women and the U.S. Constitution explores other issues of central concern to contemporary women—areas that, strictly speaking, are not yet considered a part of constitutional law. Women's traditional labor and its unique character, and women and the welfare state, are two examples of topics treated here from the perspective of their potentially transformative role in the future development of constitutional law.