Constitutional Orphan: Gender Equality and the Nineteenth Amendment

Abstract

In 1922 over 250 women from Albany, Georgia, voted in a local election. The mayor sought to purge their votes because the women did not pay a poll tax, and only those citizens who were blind or had lost limbs fighting for the Confederacy were exempt from the tax. The case advanced to the Georgia Supreme Court, where the justices considered the reach and enforceability of the Nineteenth Amendment. The court affirmed the validity of the women's votes, but the case demonstrated gaps in how the Nineteenth Amendment was understood and implemented. Ambiguities about women's right to vote, which persisted in the years following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, are expertly detailed in Paula A. Monopoli's Constitutional Orphan. As Monopoli shows, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment did not, in one fell swoop, guarantee women's full citizenship. Rather, a legal vacuum greeted the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, rendering...