Does the 14th Amendment Give Women the Right to Vote?
In this activity you will analyze documents related to the women’s suffrage movement and the New Departure strategy.
In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified, granting citizenship to persons born or naturalized in the United States, which included formerly enslaved people. Next, the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote – a key component of citizenship in the United States.
But one half of the adult population – women – were still not guaranteed this right. Women’s suffrage supporters had been organizing and pressuring Congress since the mid 1800s. After the passage of the 14th Amendment, Missouri suffragists Francis and Virginia Minor put forward a new argument, that the Constitution already guaranteed the right to vote for women, they just had to exercise it. The National Woman Suffrage Association embraced this idea and championed it as new national suffrage strategy known as the “New Departure” that encouraged women to test this argument by voting.
Follow the steps below. Read the questions and analyze the documents that follow; click “View Primary Source Details” to see each one more closely and view its transcript. Answer the questions in the blank boxes that follow each document group. Then click “When You’re Done,” where you’ll need to use what you learned from the documents to reflect on the effectiveness of the New Departure strategy.
