Women and the Constitution

Abstract

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.