Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T13:40:08.596Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Women and the Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2020

Joan Hoff-Wilson*
Affiliation:
Organization of American Historians

Extract

Since the drafting of the federal Constitution in 1787, the legal status of women in the United States has passed through four distinct phases and is on the brink of entering a fifth one. In this two-hundred-year period, there has been more change in the last twenty years than in the previous onehundred- and-eighty. Yet, a decade and a half ago scholarly classes about women and the Constitution could not be taught because too little primary research had been conducted in either the new social history with its subfield of women or the latest version of the new legal history with its subfield of sex discrimination.

Both subfields reflect the increased interest of historians and lawyers in interdisciplinary research techniques developed in this country and abroad since the 1960s.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1985

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Gordon, Robert W., “ Hurst, J . Willard and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography,” Law and Society Review, 10, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 5 1.Google Scholar

2 Hurst, J. Willard, “Legal History: A Research Program,” Wisconsin Law Review, no. 3 (May 1942): 331.Google Scholar

3 Hurst, James Willard, “The State of Legal History,“Reviews in American History, 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 298Google Scholar; Gordon, Robert W., “Historicism in Legal Scholarship,” Yale Law Review,90 (1981): 1052.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Cott, Nancy F. and Pleck, Elizabeth H., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Simon and Schuster 1979), 17.Google Scholar

5 Pleck, Elizabeth H., “Women's History: Gender as a Category,” in Gardner, James B. and Adams, George Rollie, eds., Ordinary People and Everyday Life (Nashville: The American Association for State and Local History, 1983), 54.Google Scholar

6 Isabel, Marcus, “Feminist Legal Strategies: The Shoe That Never Fits,” unpublished paper delivered at the Sixth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, 1984, p. 11; Scales, Ann C., “Towards a Feminist Jurisprudence,” Indiana Law Journal, 56, no. 3 (1981): 375444;Google Scholar and Williams, Wendy W., “The Equality Crisis: Some Reflections on Culture, Courts, and Feminism,” Women's Rights Law Reporter, 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 175200.Google Scholar

7 Gordon, , “Historicism in Legal Scholarship,” pp. 10171056CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tushnet, Mark, “Legal Scholarship: Its Causes and Cure,” Yale Law Review 90 (1981): 12051223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, Lawrence M., A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 567595Google Scholar; Horowitz, Morton J., “The Rise of Legal Formalism,” American Journal of Legal History 19, no. 4 (October 1975): 251-64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scheiber, Harry N., “American Constitutional History and and the New Legal History: Complementary Themes in Two Modes,” Journal of American History 68, no. 2 (September 1981): 337350CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For feminist legal theory see articles by Marcus, Williams and Scales cited above.

8 Shklar, Judith, Legalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964 and 1981 editions), 10Google Scholar.

9 Quoted material from Marcus, , “Feminist Legal Strategies,” p. 9Google Scholar.

10 ibid., pp. 14-15; Williams, , “The Equality Crisis,” pp. 175180,Google Scholar 200; Giligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982Google Scholar); Offen, Karen, “Toward an Historical Definition of Feminism: The Contribution of Frances Center for Research on Women,” working paper no. 22, Stanford University, pp. 110,Google Scholar passim.

11 For a more detailed discussion of the significance of the doctrine of separate spheres see: Williams, , “The Equality Crisis,” pp. 177179Google Scholar and Pleck, , “Women's History,” pp. 5960Google Scholar. A more detailed discussion of definitions of feminism and progress for women over time can be found in Offen, “Toward a Historical Definition of Feminism,” and Hoff-Wilson, Joan, Balancing the Scales: Changing Legal Status of American Women from the Colonial Period to the Present (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,Google Scholar forthcoming), chapter one.

12 Pole, J. R., The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press), xii, 112147, 289,358Google Scholar.

13 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 302Google Scholar; and Coleman, James S., “Rawls, Nozick, and Educational Equality,” The Public Interest, no. 43 (Spring 1976): 121122Google Scholar.

14 United States v. Carolene Products Co., 304 U.S. 152n.4 (1938)

15 Pole, Pursuit of Equality, p. 288; Kopes, Clayton, “From New Deal to Termination ,” Pacific Historical Review, 47 (March 1978): 564,Google Scholar ftnt. 37.

16 Gordon, , “Hurst and the Common Law Tradition,” pp. 910Google Scholar, passim; Horowitz, Morton J., “The Conservative Tradition in the Writing of American History,” American Journal of Legal History 17 (1973): 275-94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Rise of Legal Formalism,” pp. 251-64.

17 Morris, Richard B., Studies in the History of American Law (New York: Octagon Books, 1974; reprint of the original 1958 edition), pp. 126200Google Scholar; Haskins, George L., “Reception of the Common Law in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts: Case Study [of Dower Rights],” in Billias, George Athan, ed., Selected Essays: Law and Authority in Colonial America (Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1965), pp. 1731Google Scholar. The consideration given by Friedman, to the legal status of women in his History of American Law is far superior to Hurst's in Law and Social Process in the United States (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972Google Scholar), Two publications by lawyers in the field of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century legal history do not focus on the specific procedural and substantive changes in the new laws of the land affecting women, except perfunctorily to note the undermining of the right of dower through court decision after 1800. See Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 5658Google Scholar and Nelson, William E., Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 9, 48Google Scholar, 228n175, 249n34, 253n100. Tushnet's, Mark study of American slave law does not discuss any legal distinctions based on sex, not even the obvious question of miscegenation. See: “The American Law of Slavery, 1810- 1860, A Study in the Persistence of Legal Autonomy,” Law and Society Review 10 (Fall 1975): 120-84Google Scholar.

18 For a general discussion of the historiographical and methodological problems facing those who try to write interdisciplinary legal history see the unpublished work in progress by Sandra F. Van Burkleo, “An Independence Beggarly and Barren: Kentucky Land Politics, Depression, and the Case of Green v. Biddle, ,” especially draft pages 1028Google Scholar. Recent quantitative studies of note include: Greenberg, Douglas, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691- 1776 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976Google Scholar); Hindus, Michael Stephen, “Black Justice under White Law: Persecutions of Blacks in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History 63 (1976): 575-99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lebsock, Suzanne, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984Google Scholar); Koehler, Lyle, A Search for Power: The “Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, III., University of Illinois Press, 1980Google Scholar). For a general review of the latest literature on American women up to 1815, see: Mary Beth, Norton, “The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 593619Google Scholar.

19 Gordon, , “Historicism in Legal Scholarship,” pp. 10451056Google Scholar; Tushnet, “Legal Scholarship,” pp. 1205-1223; Horowitz, Morton J., “The Historical Contingency of the role of History,” Yale Law Journal 90 (1981): 10571059CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michelman, Frank I., “Politics as Medicine: On Misleading Legal Scholarship,” Yale Law Journals (1981): 12241228CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Freeman, Alan D., “Truth and Mystification in Legal Scholarship,” Yale LawJournal90 (1981): 1228Google Scholar.

20 Douglas Hay, , “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, et al, Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: A. Lane, 1975), 17, 2426; TushnetGoogle Scholar,

21 American Law of Slavery,” p. 124; Hindus, Michael Stephen, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980Google Scholar), passim; idem, “Prison and Plantation,” p. 10; Greenberg, Crime and Law in New York, passim; Joan Hoff-Wilson, “Hidden Riches: Legal Records and Women, 1750-1825,” in Kelley, Mary, ed.. Woman's Being, Woman's Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979), 1617Google Scholar.

21 Horowitz, , “Historical Contingency,” p. 1057Google Scholar.

22 Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 4 1 , 85, 93-94, 99, 112, 162, 287Google Scholar.

23 Rossi, Alice S., ed.. The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973; reprint Bantam edition, 1974), 1015Google Scholar.

24 Horowitz, , Transformation of American Law, 4; Peggy A. Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980), 69Google Scholar. Following discussion in this section is based on Albie Sachs and Hoff-Wilson, Joan, Sexism and the Law: A Study in Male Beliefs and Legal Bias in Britain and the United States (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 7580Google Scholar; and Chused, Richard H., “Married Women's Property Law: 1800- 1850,” The Georgetown Law Journal 71 (1983): 13591425Google Scholar.

25 For details about such voting and law practice cases as United States v. Anthony, 24 F Cas. 892 (C.C.N.D.N.Y. 1873); Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130 (1873); and Minor v. Happersett 88 U.S. 162 (1875), see Sachs, and Wilson, , Sexism and the Law, pp. 85106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 The following discussion of Muller is from Nancy S. Erickson, “Historical Background of ‘Protective’ Labor Legislation: Muller v. Oregon,“in Weisberg, D. Kelly, Women and the Law: A Social Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1982), 2: 155186Google Scholar; Friesen, Jennifer and Collins, Ronald K. L., “Looking Back on Muller v. Oregon,” American Bar Association Journal 69 (March and April 1983): 294-98, 472-77Google Scholar; and Sachs, and Wilson, , Sexism and the Law, pp. 113116Google Scholar.

27 Muller's brief, p. 24. Erickson notes that this analogy was very similar to one used by Mathew Carpenter in defending Bradwell's, Myra right to practice law in Bradwell v. Illinois 83 U.S. 130, 134(1873Google Scholar).

28 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985), 252305, 358 (ftnt 127Google Scholar).

29 Goesaert et. v. Cleary et al, Members of the Liquor Controll Commission of Michigan, 335 U.S. 464 (1948). Goesaert was not overruled until Sail'er Inn, Inc. v. Kirby, 5 Cal. 3d 1. 20 585 P. 2d 329 (1971). Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57 91961). Hoyt was not overruled until Taylor v. Lousiana 419 U.S. 522 (1975).

30 West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937); Sachs and Wilson, Sexism and the Law, pp. 114-116; Scharf, Lois, “ER and Feminism,” in Hoff-Wilson, Joan and Lightman, Marjorie, eds., Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984), 234236Google Scholar; idem. Female Employment Feminism and the Great Depression (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980), 86-138.

31 For example, see: Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973); Califano v. Goldfarb, 430 U.S. 199 (1977); Califano v. Westcott, 433 U.S. 76 (1979); Wengler v. Druggists Mutual Insurance Co., 446 U.S. 142 (1980). 446 U.S. 142 (1980).

32 Michael M. v. Superior Court, 450 U.S. 464 (1981); Rostker v. Goldberg, 453 U.S. 57 (1981).

33 The most famous of the “reverse discrimination” cases remains. Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), even though this decision did not decide the issue because the Justices chose to argue on narrow statutory grounds that UC Davis had to admit Bakke to medical school because it had violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, while also maintaining that race “may” be a factor in affirmative action programs at educational institutions. Most “reverse discrimination” cases have involved union seniority questions or voluntary affirmative action programs undertaken by cities or industries.

34 For example, see: Kahn v. Shevin, 416 351 (1974); Schlesinger v. Ballard, 419 U.S. 498 (1975); and Califano v. Webster. 97 S. Ct. 1192.

35 Personnel Administration of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256 (1979).

36 See Scales, , “Feminist Jurisprudence,” pp. 375444Google Scholar for a detailed discussion of Supreme Court cases on pregnancy; and Williams, “The Equality Crisis,” for ways in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) has been used not to treat women equally, but to give them special treatment.

37 ln 1984, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the U.S. Jaycees to admit women and said that law firms may not discriminate on the basis of sex which lawyers to promote as partners. See: Roberts, et al. v. United States Jaycees, 82 L. Ed. 2nd 462 (1984), and Hishon v. King and Spaulding, 81 L. Ed. 2nd 59 (1984). At the same time in Grove City College v. Bell, 79 L, Ed. 2nd 516 (1984). It gutted Title IX by deciding that individual units of educational institutions could discriminate and not endanger the federal aid received by other units, saying receipt of Basic Educational Opportunity Grants by some students did not require institution wide coverage under Title IX. Attempts last year to override this decision with provisions in a Civil Rights Restoration Act failed in Congress.

38 Tribe, Laurence H., American Constitutional Law (Mineola, New York: The Foundation Press, Inc., 1978), 602608Google Scholar; Blakely, Mary Kay, “Is One Woman's Sexuality Another Woman's Pornography?“, Ms. (April 1985): 3747Google Scholar, 120-121; Sworkin, Andrea, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee, 1984Google Scholar); MacKinnon, Catharine, “Not a Moral Issue,” Yale Law and Policy Review 2 (Spring, 1984): 321345Google Scholar.

39 Offen, , “Toward a Definition of Feminism,” p. 10Google Scholar; Williams, , “The Equality Crisis,” p. 200Google Scholar.