Voting and Jury Service

Abstract

Chapter 5 delves into the state cases, which asked whether voting and jury service for women were coextensive. While most courts saw the Nineteenth Amendment as self-executing in terms of voting, many construed it narrowly in terms of whether its scope encompassed other political rights, beyond voting. The chapter connects the lack of congressional enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth Amendment, to this thin conception of its scope. It suggests that the NWP and the NLWV, although they were working in other sites of reform, like state legislatures, were not much in the state courts. And it was in those courts, that there was a possibility judges could have been persuaded to adopt a robust interpretation of the Nineteenth Amendment—one that understood it to extend other political rights to women.