For example, at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, none of the original Thirteen Colonies gave all citizens the right to vote, all attaching restrictions based on factors such as sex, race, age, and ownership of land. In 1919, the United States Congress proposed a Constitutional amendment reading: "Section 1: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." [7], This case is often seen as one of two cases, along with Frothingham v. Mellon, that became the genesis of the doctrine of legal standing. The 5th Amendment is arguably the most complex part of the original Bill of Rights, and has generated, and, most legal scholars would argue, necessitated, considerable interpretation on the part of the Supreme Court.

Anthony was the only woman brought to trial and pleaded not guilty. 162 (1875),[1] is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Constitution did not grant anyone, and in this case specifically a female citizen of the state of Missouri, a right to vote even when a state law granted rights to vote to a certain class of citizens. The Nineteenth Amendment, which became a part of the Constitution in 1920, effectively overruled Minor v. Happersett by prohibiting discrimination in voting rights based on sex. So important a change in the condition of citizenship as it actually existed, if intended, would have been expressly declared. 9. Suffragists would have to develop other strategies to change state and national laws. Virginia Minor was not allowed to register to vote, so she brought a case against the registrar, Reese Happersett. The Supreme Court readily accepted that Minor was a citizen of the United States, but it held that the constitutionally protected privileges of citizenship did not include the right to vote. On July 9, 1868, Louisiana and South Carolina voted to ratify the amendment, after they had rejected it a … [1][6] On the same day, the Court also decided a companion case, Leser v. Garnett which upheld the Amendment's ratification process on the merits. Fairchild v. Hughes, 258 U.S. 126 (1922), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that a general citizen, in a state that already had women's suffrage, lacked standing to challenge the validity of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. [11] The State of Missouri did not send counsel to defend its decision before the Supreme Court, choosing instead to justify its decision in a three-sentence demurrer. [20], List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 88, "Dates of Supreme Court Decisions and Arguments: United States Reports, Volumes 2–107 (1791–1882)", "Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minor_v._Happersett&oldid=980736885, History of voting rights in the United States, United States Supreme Court cases of the Waite Court, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 28 September 2020, at 04:32. In Minor v. Happersett, so did the United States Supreme Court. [14], The court then asked whether the right to vote was one of the "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's adoption in 1868. [3] In a dissenting opinion of a 1964 Supreme Court case involving reapportionment in the Alabama state legislature, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II included Minor in a list of past decisions about voting and apportionment which were no longer being followed. However, the term standing was not associated with Article III until the New Deal era. The amendment guaranteed the protection of the rights of citizens, and suffragists argued that voting was a right of citizens. In some later voting rights cases, however, Minor was cited in opposition to the claim that the federal Constitution conferred a general right to vote, and in support of restrictive election laws involving poll taxes,[17] literacy tests,[18] and the role of political parties in special elections.
The Fairchild decision marked a departure from prior doctrine, which had allowed any citizen to sue to preserve a public right. On July 7, 1920, Charles S. Fairchild challenged the validity of the ratification process for that Amendment in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. [12], The opinion (written by Chief Justice Morrison Waite) first asked whether Minor was a citizen of the United States, and answered that she was, citing both the Fourteenth Amendment and earlier common law. In February, the Court announced a unanimous decision authored by Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, concluding that Fairchild, as a private citizen, lacked standing to challenge the amendment's ratification under the limitations of the Case or Controversy Clause of Article III. [1], The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Missouri voting legislation, saying that voting was not an inherent right of citizenship, that the Constitution neither granted nor forbade voting rights for women, and that allowing only male citizens to vote was not an infringement of Minor's rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1875, Minor v. Happersett went to the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Fourteenth Amendment, therefore, did not give women the right to vote. The state court observed that the "almost universal practice of all of the States ... from the adoption of the Constitution to the present time" was to restrict voting rights to men only;[8] and, additionally, that the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to give the rights of citizenship to the former slaves, and not to force other changes in state laws.

Citing a variety of historical sources, it found that it was not. [7], The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the registrar and against Minor. [3], Virginia Minor, a leader of the women's suffrage movement in Missouri,[4] attempted to register to vote on October 15, 1872, in St. Louis County, Missouri, but was refused on the grounds that she was a woman. For example, the 19th Amendment prohibited state and federal governments from denying citizens the right to vote because of their sex. Exploring the common-law origins of citizenship, the court observed that "new citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization" and that the Constitution "does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens."

In 1872, members of the National Woman Suffrage Association from all over the United States decided to register to vote. The Minor v. Happersett ruling was based on an interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The challenge sought to prevent Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes from officially declaring the Amendment valid. In 1875, Minor v. Happersett went to the Supreme Court of the United States.


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