Law School by Tweet: 14th Amendment
Title
Law School by Tweet: 14th Amendment
Description
The hashtag #HATM stands for historians at the movies; is there an opera equivalent?!
Saw “The Mother of Us All†last night. Happy to report that the all-â™€ï¸ artistic team: @dcandillari & Louise Proske + @FeliciaLMoore in the title role gave a great (and gay!) performance. 🧵
Gertrude Stein has Susan B Anthony argue that “male†was inserted in the Constitution for the first time b/c men are afraid of us.
It’s an intriguing argument! And probably true.
I was tempted to stand at the exit w/a sign saying “Ask me about the 14th Amdt.†So here goes...
First, the basics: in the Constitution, every state gets 2 Senators.
House members are awarded based on state population.
Electoral College votes are the # of Senators + # of House members.
So, more House members = more power.
From the beginning, states wanted to count every inhabitant so they’d get more House seats, but without letting women or Black men vote. (Then and now, if African-Americans and white women voted as a block, we’d outvote white men in southern states.)
This is why enslaved people were counted as â…— of a human being - so enslavers would get more seats.
At the end of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was drafted to define citizenship in Section 1 and repeal the â…— clause in Section 2.
But its drafters--abolitionists like Wendell Phillips & Charles Sumner--tussled over who would count and who would vote.
How could they separate voting from counting-for-proportional-representation?
If being counted wasn’t tied to voting, southern states would end up w/even MORE power than they had before the war. They’d bar African-Americans from voting but count them as whole people, not ⅗. (This is what soon happened anyway.)
If being counted WAS tied to voting, how could states count all their women without letting them vote?
@EllenDubois10 explains: “the Republican authors of the 14th Amdt had to decide between enfranchising women or specifying male citizens as the basis of representation.â€
So that’s why Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says male.
It does not say that only men can vote or that only men count. It says that if states don’t let “male inhabitants†vote (for any reason other than criminal punishment*), they’ll lose House seats.
*Hence states in both the south and the north quickly expanded criminal codes to put more Black men in jail so they couldn’t vote. That & the exception in the 13th Amdt are why criminal disenfranchisement persists today. But that’s another thread.
Was Gertrude Stein right to have Susan B Anthony sing that “As the result of my work, for the first time the word ‘male’ has been written into the constitution of the United States concerning suffrage�
Yes.
“Two decades of women’s rights agitation had destroyed the centuries-old assumption that political rights applied only to men.†-@EllenDubois10
It never needed saying before. But by the end of the Civil War, women were a political force. To exclude us, you had to say so.
Historian Laura Free offered an important addendum on FB. She's not on Twitter, so I'm sharing for her: "The original drafts of the Amendment did not specify a voter's gender. It wasn't until Congress had been receiving petitions (From Susan B. Anthony, among others)......that the word "male" enters into the language of the Amendment. Prior to this they simply assumed that all voters were men by default. Once women asked, Congressmen in power knew they had to specify or risk inadvertently enfranchising women with the 14th Amendment! "They were not caught off guard - Stanton wrote a letter in late 1865 warning that the word male was a possibility in the Amendment so they initiated a whole petition campaign to try to stop it. (One of them is on display at the National Archives)." "I was dissatisfied with previous accounts of the gendered language in the Amendment. So I tracked the day by day discussion of the Amendment's language and then the path of the suffrage petitions in committee. The Joint Committee of Fifteen had many versions of the Amendment......before the petitions started coming in. Then after they received a number of the petitions, Roscoe Conkling of New York proposed that the word "male" be added to the Amendment."
Saw “The Mother of Us All†last night. Happy to report that the all-â™€ï¸ artistic team: @dcandillari & Louise Proske + @FeliciaLMoore in the title role gave a great (and gay!) performance. 🧵
Gertrude Stein has Susan B Anthony argue that “male†was inserted in the Constitution for the first time b/c men are afraid of us.
It’s an intriguing argument! And probably true.
I was tempted to stand at the exit w/a sign saying “Ask me about the 14th Amdt.†So here goes...
First, the basics: in the Constitution, every state gets 2 Senators.
House members are awarded based on state population.
Electoral College votes are the # of Senators + # of House members.
So, more House members = more power.
From the beginning, states wanted to count every inhabitant so they’d get more House seats, but without letting women or Black men vote. (Then and now, if African-Americans and white women voted as a block, we’d outvote white men in southern states.)
This is why enslaved people were counted as â…— of a human being - so enslavers would get more seats.
At the end of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was drafted to define citizenship in Section 1 and repeal the â…— clause in Section 2.
But its drafters--abolitionists like Wendell Phillips & Charles Sumner--tussled over who would count and who would vote.
How could they separate voting from counting-for-proportional-representation?
If being counted wasn’t tied to voting, southern states would end up w/even MORE power than they had before the war. They’d bar African-Americans from voting but count them as whole people, not ⅗. (This is what soon happened anyway.)
If being counted WAS tied to voting, how could states count all their women without letting them vote?
@EllenDubois10 explains: “the Republican authors of the 14th Amdt had to decide between enfranchising women or specifying male citizens as the basis of representation.â€
So that’s why Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says male.
It does not say that only men can vote or that only men count. It says that if states don’t let “male inhabitants†vote (for any reason other than criminal punishment*), they’ll lose House seats.
*Hence states in both the south and the north quickly expanded criminal codes to put more Black men in jail so they couldn’t vote. That & the exception in the 13th Amdt are why criminal disenfranchisement persists today. But that’s another thread.
Was Gertrude Stein right to have Susan B Anthony sing that “As the result of my work, for the first time the word ‘male’ has been written into the constitution of the United States concerning suffrage�
Yes.
“Two decades of women’s rights agitation had destroyed the centuries-old assumption that political rights applied only to men.†-@EllenDubois10
It never needed saying before. But by the end of the Civil War, women were a political force. To exclude us, you had to say so.
Historian Laura Free offered an important addendum on FB. She's not on Twitter, so I'm sharing for her: "The original drafts of the Amendment did not specify a voter's gender. It wasn't until Congress had been receiving petitions (From Susan B. Anthony, among others)......that the word "male" enters into the language of the Amendment. Prior to this they simply assumed that all voters were men by default. Once women asked, Congressmen in power knew they had to specify or risk inadvertently enfranchising women with the 14th Amendment! "They were not caught off guard - Stanton wrote a letter in late 1865 warning that the word male was a possibility in the Amendment so they initiated a whole petition campaign to try to stop it. (One of them is on display at the National Archives)." "I was dissatisfied with previous accounts of the gendered language in the Amendment. So I tracked the day by day discussion of the Amendment's language and then the path of the suffrage petitions in committee. The Joint Committee of Fifteen had many versions of the Amendment......before the petitions started coming in. Then after they received a number of the petitions, Roscoe Conkling of New York proposed that the word "male" be added to the Amendment."
Creator
Daily Suffragist
Source
Date
12/02/2020, 17/02/2020
Files
Collection
Citation
Daily Suffragist, “Law School by Tweet: 14th Amendment,” Daily Suffragist, accessed April 26, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/237.