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INSIDE THIS ISSUE
1
Honest Work and Genuine Gratitude
2
Your Guide to Wildlife Tracking Fun
2
A Lifeline for Brain Injury Victims Seeking Justice
3
Forbidden Baby Names
3
Baked Tofu Nuggets
4
A Famed Missouri Suffrage Leader’s Landmark Battle for Equality
CHAMPION OF CHANGE AN ACTIVIST’S FIGHT FOR VOTING RIGHTS SHAPED THE LEGAL LANDSCAPE FOR WOMEN
In the history of the women’s suffrage movement, Susan B. Anthony is often cast in the leading role. Although Anthony managed to vote in New York in the presidential election of 1872, she later captured headlines when she was indicted, tried, and fined $100 for voting illegally. (She never paid the fine.) In an ironic twist, a lawsuit filed by a Missouri woman who tried and failed to vote in the same election actually played a larger role in lighting the path forward for the suffrage movement. The case, Minor vs. Happersett , triggered a series of court rulings that effectively blocked efforts to win women’s suffrage through the courts. Nearly five decades later, advocates finally won that battle via the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The story began when St. Louis County resident Virginia Minor, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Missouri, was denied the right to vote in 1872. Minor and her husband, Francis Minor, an attorney, sued the registrar, Reese Happersett. They argued that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 to extend Bill of Rights protections to formerly enslaved people, established
voting rights for all citizens. The Missouri Supreme Court denied Minor’s claim, asserting that citizenship didn’t automatically convey the right to vote.
The Minors appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that women’s suffrage was consistent with the intent of the framers of the Constitution. The high court, however, ruled that the Constitution did not guarantee voting rights to anyone. Pointing out that some of the original 13 colonies had limited voting in a variety of ways, such as requiring that voters own land, the justices held that if the framers had intended all citizens to vote, they would have said so. Courts continued to cite Minor vs. Happersett until the 1960s, using it as a precedent justifying such measures as poll taxes and literacy tests for voters. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court finally broke that pattern by beginning to apply the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to voting rights — further lowering longstanding voting barriers for all citizens.
Practicing in Missouri and Illinois
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