Minor v. Happersett
The Court ruled that the Constitution does not give anyone a right to vote simply by being a citizen, so Missouri's law limiting voting to men did not violate the rights of a woman who was a U.S. citizen.
The decision meant that women could not use the courts to claim a constitutional right to vote, leaving the question of women's suffrage to the states and, later, to a constitutional amendment.
“Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and that the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void”
The Court's core holding that the Constitution does not itself guarantee anyone the right to vote.
How it got here: A Missouri trial court ruled against a woman denied voter registration, and she appealed directly to the Supreme Court to decide the constitutional question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Virginia Minor, a woman who was a U.S. citizen living in Missouri, tried to register to vote and was refused by a local registrar because Missouri's constitution and laws limited voting to men. She sued the registrar, arguing that as a citizen she was entitled to vote under the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment.
The question before the Court
Did the Constitution give women the right to vote, so that Missouri could not limit voting to men?
Why it matters
The ruling closed off the courts as a path to winning women's suffrage nationwide, meaning advocates had to pursue change state-by-state or through a constitutional amendment. It stood as the controlling precedent on the question until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified decades later.
What changes now
This was a final decision on the merits, resolving the specific legal question of whether the Constitution guaranteed voting rights to citizens. The ruling left the matter of women's suffrage to be decided by individual states or by further constitutional amendment. Nearly half a century later, the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, would specifically guarantee women the right to vote regardless of this earlier ruling.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether women should have the right to vote as a matter of policy, nor did it forbid states from extending voting rights to women. It decided only that the Constitution, as it then stood, did not itself require states to let women vote.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first asked whether women are citizens of the United States, and concluded that citizenship has never depended on sex — women, like men, have always been citizens by birth or naturalization, both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment.
- The Court then asked whether the right to vote is one of the 'privileges and immunities' that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees to citizens, since if it were, Missouri's men-only voting law would violate it.
- To answer that, the Court looked at whether voting rights were ever equal to citizenship: at the time the Constitution was adopted, every state limited voting to certain classes of people (often by property, tax payment, or residency), and no state let all its citizens vote, showing that citizenship and voting rights were always treated as separate things.
- The Court pointed to the Fourteenth Amendment's own text, which reduces a state's representation in Congress if it denies the vote to male citizens, reasoning that this penalty provision would make no sense if all citizens, including women, already had a constitutional right to vote.
- The Court also noted that the later Fifteenth Amendment specifically barred denying the vote based on race, reasoning that this additional amendment would have been unnecessary if the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges-and-immunities clause already guaranteed voting rights to all citizens.
- Based on this history and the structure of the Constitution, the Court concluded that the Constitution does not itself confer the right to vote on anyone, leaving states free to decide who among their citizens may vote.