Minor v. Happersett

Supreme Court of United States
21 Wall. 162 (1875)

ELI5:

Rule of Law:

The right to vote (suffrage) is not a privilege or immunity of United States citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment; therefore, states can constitutionally restrict the right to vote to men.

Facts:

Virginia Minor was a native-born, free, white citizen of the United States and a resident of the state of Missouri.
Minor was over the age of twenty-one, meeting the age requirement for voting.
The Constitution of Missouri explicitly limited the right of suffrage to 'every male citizen of the United States.'
Minor presented herself to Reese Happersett, the registrar of voters in her district, and applied to be registered as a lawful voter.
Happersett refused to register Minor for the sole reason that she was a woman.

Procedural Posture:

Virginia Minor sued Reese Happersett in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, a Missouri trial court of first instance, for refusing to register her to vote.
The trial court found in favor of the defendant, Happersett.
Minor, as the appellant, appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court of Missouri, the state's highest court.
The Supreme Court of Missouri affirmed the trial court's judgment for Happersett, the appellee.
Minor then appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of the United States.

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Issue:

Does a state law that confines the right of suffrage to male citizens violate the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

Opinions:

Majority - Chief Justice Waite

No. A state law confining the right of suffrage to men does not violate the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court reasoned that while women are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship does not automatically confer the right to vote. Historically, at the time of the Constitution's adoption, states had varying qualifications for voting, and none extended suffrage to all citizens; it was common to exclude people based on sex, race, or property ownership. The Court concluded that if the framers had intended to make suffrage a fundamental right of national citizenship, they would have done so explicitly. The Court further noted that the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment penalizes states for denying the vote to 'male inhabitants,' which implies that states possess the power to deny it. Finally, the subsequent adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibits denying the vote based on race, would have been unnecessary if the Fourteenth Amendment had already granted suffrage to all citizens.

Analysis:

This decision severely narrowed the scope of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, confirming it would not be a vehicle for the expansion of fundamental rights against the states. By decoupling the rights of national citizenship from the right to vote, the Court affirmed that suffrage was a political right governed by the states, not a civil right guaranteed by the federal government. This ruling was a significant blow to the women's suffrage movement, forcing activists to abandon the strategy of seeking voting rights through the courts and to focus instead on the lengthy political process of passing a constitutional amendment, which culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

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