The Amendment That Corrected the Founders |
The anti-suffrage movement made many arguments. Women lacked the capacity for reasoned political judgment. Voting would corrupt feminine virtue. The domestic sphere was their proper domain. Some opponents argued that because women didn't bear arms, they had no standing to participate in civic decisions that arms might be required to enforce.
My son graduated from West Point. My brother spent a career in Army Special Forces. My wife raised three boys and worked full time while I built a business, coached youth sports, and helped run an Eagle Scout troop. That's the family credential behind the following. The argument that civic participation requires military service is one I'd debate with anyone who wants to make it. The argument that women lack the capacity for political judgment won't get a rebuttal, because it doesn't deserve one.
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920, after 72 years of organized suffragist activism that began at Seneca Falls in 1848. The suffragists' argument was simple and correct: in a republic whose founding document declared that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, there was no principled basis for excluding half the population from the act of consenting. The counterarguments were motivated by interest, habit, and condescension dressed as constitutional theory. They lost because they should have........