For my research, im looking at the equal protections clause and how it changed from disallowing women to benefit from its protections in the late 19th century to concluding the exact opposite in 1971.
First of all, it is embarrassing to admit that I knew absolutely nothing about this crucial part of the Constitution before this paper. I didn’t even know where it was located or what it said. Upon a simple reading, it seems to be very straightforward in its objective. It does not cease to amaze me how it could have ever been argued that it did not apply to women, but it was, and for more than a hundred years, that is the interpretation that was generally accepted.
Although I now understand the reasoning behind how the Supreme Court managed to justify this exclusion, it is amazing to me that two such opposing sides could stem from the same short, seemingly simple text. The EPC was used in both instances to accomplish whatever means the court had in mind, in one instance to justify excluding women from possessing certain privileges and immunities and then later to decide that they do fall under the clause's protections.
I’ve been stumbling on a lot of heated feminist literature while researching for this (but not using it in my paper obviously!) so maybe im just a little bitter right now, but I don’t think women have ever been fully in control of attaining their own rights, and have been forced to rely on the whims of the Justices and whether they are up to speed with shifts in the social climate or lagging behind. The fact that there are such drastic changes in constitutional interpretation between cases, like from Plessy to Brown or Bradwell to Reed, makes it seem obvious that the Constitution really is a living Constitution and that it’s meaning changes with the times, rather than being just a flat blueprint.
These are just generalizations of course and mostly ramblings after doing research for papers for like 2 months straight, but it does all make me wonder how these decisions are being made and justified and rediscovered and justified and repealed and justified etc. Very puzzling!
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There are several ways to read this history, and one is to do so negatively--women were not parties to the Constitution in any meaningful sense and were treated little better than slaves at law, etc. etc.
But there is another way to read it. Women didn't rely on the "whim of justices." To the contrary, they began a two hundred year tradition of rights assertion in the face of such decisions and politics. This history may have its tragic moments (in the Greek sense of the word) but it indicates that the last word on women's rights were women and their own rights consciousness. Not that the struggle is over. The fundamentalist religious reaction of the last quarter century has attempted to reassert traditional gender roles in the face of this modernization. I don't think it will win.
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