Jury Service and Women's Citizenship before and after the Nineteenth Amendment

Abstract

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

Gendered Paths to Legal Citizenship: The Case of Latin-American Immigrants in Phoenix, Arizona

“…History indicates that even when citizenship is made available to previously excluded groups such as women, African Americans, and Latinos, the granting of formal citizenship rights remains problematic given the unequal distribution of resources, the maintenance of a second‐class citizenship, and the marking of certain U.S. citizens as “others” (Bosniak ; Glenn ; Lister ; Luibhéid & Cantú ; Ritter ; Segura & Zavella ; Tienda ). As Taub and Schnieder point out,

The Anglo‐American legal tradition purports to value equality, by which it means, at a minimum, equal application of the law to all persons.

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Gender discrimination and juries in the 20th century

“…58 The debate on women's jury franchise began in the late nineteenth century. 59 Some states had provided women access to jury lists in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (Ritter, 2002), and some permitted women to serve as jurors only to rescind the right subsequently. 60 However, at least nineteen states had women serving on juries by 1921 61 and just over half of these states provided full jury franchise automatically upon women gaining political suffrage.…”

“…For example, in Hoyt v Florida , the Court upheld the ‘opt in’ regime for women’s jury service, stating that women’s centrality ‘of home and family life’ meant that it was not unconstitutional to relieve women from the civic duty of jury service ‘unless she herself determines that such service is consistent with her own special responsibilities’. 112 This rationale—women’s central place in domestic roles—hung long and hard in these recalcitrant states, following (or perhaps leading) the trend seen globally (Ritter, 2002: 510–511). Even by 1973, although all 50 states permitted women to be jurors, at least 19 states still maintained gender-based exemptions meaning their jury lists severely under-represented women.…”

‘Building a New and Better Order’? Women and Jury Service in England and Wales,c.1920–70

“…Indeed, as the course of events in the USA in the wake of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1920) demonstrated, admittance to jury service was not an automatic or inevitable outcome of the achievement of women's suffrage. 16 The next section of this article examines the three main ways in which the law on juries continued to discriminate against women after 1919: the rules for jury qualification, the use (or abuse) of peremptory challenge, and the judge's discretionary power to order a single-sex jury. The objections of 'legal men' to reform are then examined.…”