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At first place, the constitutional bases of social change for women in the United States appear to rest on the civil rights delegation and Supreme Court decisions that took place between 1980 and 1990. Before then, for the long balance of its existence, the United States Constitution seems to have meted out justice to women with either indifference or paternalism. Gender is barely addressed in the vast historical landscape of the Constitution.
There is much to support this view of gender and the Constitution. The original language of the Constitution could be strikingly neutral with respect to gender precisely because the states would continue to regulate political and civil rights as well as much domestic issues as marital property rights. To be sure, the persistence of terms such as "person" in this eighteenth-century document suggests that the framers of the Constitution left the door open for persons, in all their legal and political manifestations, to include females. If they did so consciously, however, they were secure in the knowledge that the states were closing the door by employing the term "males" in their own statutes and constitutions. Federalism, then, helps to account for the Constitution`s silence on gender. Only when the Reconstruction amendments reshaped relations between the citizen, the states, and the federal government, and delineated distinctions between male citizen and female citizen, did gender work its way into the formal language of the Constitution, with negative consequences for the legal status of women.
Considering, then, the apparently sparse role of gender in much of the evolution of the Constitution, it is not at all surprising that scholars who are interested in the role of women in relation to the Constitution have riveted their attention on the years between 1960 and 1990. Notwithstanding the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, it helped women advanced farther toward achieving legal equality within the 30 years before 1990 than in the preceding 170 years of concentrated efforts by the Women`s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Having said this, it needs to be emphasized that we have scarcely identified or connected the skeletal framework of a women`s legal history, much less than the lucid discourse over the political and social radiation of changes in the legal status of women. Our understanding of women`s legal rights in relation to the Constitution would be greatly enhanced if contemporary course about women and the Constitution took place within a well reconsidered historical context and if, in general, discourse on gender became just of the Constitutional mainstream. In order to understand the history of the very real but changing legal marginality of women, it is first necessary to fully identify not only context but events that have shaped women`s legal rights.
There is much to support this view of gender and the Constitution. The original language of the Constitution could be strikingly neutral with respect to gender precisely because the states would continue to regulate political and civil rights as well as much domestic issues as marital property rights. To be sure, the persistence of terms such as "person" in this eighteenth-century document suggests that the framers of the Constitution left the door open for persons, in all their legal and political manifestations, to include females. If they did so consciously, however, they were secure in the knowledge that the states were closing the door by employing the term "males" in their own statutes and constitutions. Federalism, then, helps to account for the Constitution`s silence on gender. Only when the Reconstruction amendments reshaped relations between the citizen, the states, and the federal government, and delineated distinctions between male citizen and female citizen, did gender work its way into the formal language of the Constitution, with negative consequences for the legal status of women.
Considering, then, the apparently sparse role of gender in much of the evolution of the Constitution, it is not at all surprising that scholars who are interested in the role of women in relation to the Constitution have riveted their attention on the years between 1960 and 1990. Notwithstanding the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, it helped women advanced farther toward achieving legal equality within the 30 years before 1990 than in the preceding 170 years of concentrated efforts by the Women`s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Having said this, it needs to be emphasized that we have scarcely identified or connected the skeletal framework of a women`s legal history, much less than the lucid discourse over the political and social radiation of changes in the legal status of women. Our understanding of women`s legal rights in relation to the Constitution would be greatly enhanced if contemporary course about women and the Constitution took place within a well reconsidered historical context and if, in general, discourse on gender became just of the Constitutional mainstream. In order to understand the history of the very real but changing legal marginality of women, it is first necessary to fully identify not only context but events that have shaped women`s legal rights.
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