While the second article of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution specified certain voting rights connected with males only, women's rights advocates decided that the first article could be used instead to support the full citizenship rights of women.
In a strategy carried out by the more radical wing of the movement, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, woman suffrage supporters attempted to cast ballots in 1872. Susan B. Anthony was among those who did so; she was arrested and convicted for this action.
Another woman, Virginia Minor, was turned away from the St. Louis polls when she tried to vote -- and her husband, Frances Minor, sued Reese Happersett, the registrar. (Under "femme covert" presumptions in the law, Virginia Minor could not sue in her own right.)
The Minors' brief argued that "There can be no half-way citizenship. Woman, as a citizen in the United States, is entitled to all the benefits of that position, and liable to all its obligations, or to none."
In a unanimous decision, the United States Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett found that women born or naturalized in the United States were indeed American citizens, and that they always had been even before the Fourteenth Amendment. But, the Supreme Court also found, voting was not one of the "privileges and immunities of citizenship" and therefore states need not grant voting rights or suffrage to women.
Once again, the Fourteenth Amendment was used to try to ground arguments for women's equality and the right as citizens to vote and hold office -- but the courts did not agree.
