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A Woman in America

The Constitution names sex explicitly in only one place. Almost everything else a woman can claim rests on words the founders wrote to be read broadly, person and citizen, and on the movements that forced those words to include her.

Descriptive, not legal advice · the founding documents' own words

Amendment XIX

The right to vote may not be denied or abridged on account of sex. Ratified in 1920 after a movement that lasted more than seventy years.

Amendment XIV

Equal protection of the laws for every person. This is the clause the Supreme Court has used to strike down government discrimination on the basis of sex.

Amendment I

Freedom of speech, assembly, and petition. These were the constitutional tools the suffrage and later women's movements used to win the rest.

The honest caveatThe Nineteenth Amendment is the only place the Constitution mentions sex by name. Everything else rests on the sex-neutral words person and citizen as the courts have read them. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would have added an explicit guarantee, passed Congress in 1972 but was never ratified by enough states. This page describes the constitutional text as it stands.

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