Gender and citizenship after the nineteenth amendment

This essay addresses some of the ways in which women's citizenship was reconceived after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It uses the concept of ordered citizenship to understand the role of citizenship in American politics. The paper considers what suffrage meant for women's political standing during the 1920s in three areas: electoral politics, jury service, and married women's rights. In the nineteenth century, women were regarded as politically different from men and the main marker of that difference was the absence of the vote. Once women won the right to vote, the distinction between men's and women's citizenship necessarily changed. Women moved toward a political identity as liberal individual citizens. Yet this change was partial and uneven, as their citizenship remained somewhat grounded in their status in the domestic realm. Further, counterbalancing the tendency towards political inclusion was the movement to reorder the hierarchy of social groups within the imagined political community of the nation. In the 1920s, women took their place within a reordered hierarchy of civic standing.