fter the Civil War, the central goal of the woman suffrage movement became linking the struggle for women’s political equality to the enfranchisement of the freed slaves. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, feminists sought to win the vote through four major legal strategies: 1) legislative campaigning in Congress and at the state level, 2) registering to vote and casting ballots, 3) proposing a Constitutional amendment, 4) litigating in court to test women’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. By the turn of the century these efforts bore fruit in suffrage guarantees in some states; women finally gained a constitutional right to vote under the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But in the years when lawmakers were setting forth the revolutionary legal principles of Reconstruction — defining fundamental new concepts of national citizenship, due process, and equal protection—Stanton and Anthony failed to convince them that universal guarantees of citizens’ rights must include suffrage for women.

Obstacles in Congress were clear by 1866. Not only was the Fourteenth Amendment enacted (despite feminist opposition to its exclusive guarantees of male suffrage), but the Senate also rejected a proposal for woman suffrage in the District of Columbia. In 1870 Congress revisited the issue of woman suffrage in the District of Columbia. Feminists organized a petition campaign, and Stanton and Anthony testified before a Congressional committee. Stanton demanded “political equality,” arguing that women were implicitly enfranchised under the Fourteenth Amendment’s broad protection of citizens’ rights. But such arguments were unsuccessful. Congressmen foresaw differences of opinion between husbands and wives on political questions, worrying “where the authority of the family would rest” if women could vote. Feminists made no more headway in demanding that the Fifteenth Amendment be expanded to entitle women as well as African Americans to vote. Stanton attacked the Amendment, accusing lawmakers of establishing an “aristocracy of sex.” The American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone, supported the Fifteenth Amendment and sought reform at the state level. But the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, focused on the national level and a constitutional amendment barring the denial of the vote on account of sex—the principle enshrined in the Nineteenth Amendment half a century later.

The difficulties in reform at the state level were typified by the Kansas campaign of 1867. Two referenda were offered to Kansas voters: one removing the word “Negro” from the voting requirements, the other removing the word “male.” In a unified effort predating the 1869 split in the suffrage movement, Stanton and Anthony joined with Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in stumping the state on behalf of woman suffrage. But both woman suffrage and black suffrage were defeated. The Kansas campaign also steered Stanton and Anthony away from arguing in the name of universal human rights to exploiting racist beliefs. Frustrated with the Republican Party’s refusal to back woman suffrage along with black suffrage, they struck an alliance with openly racist leaders of the Kansas Democratic Party who opposed black enfranchisement. Such tactics set the stage for Stanton’s assertions that women merited the vote more than did freed slaves and recent immigrants.

Although disfranchised, women cast their ballots in defiance of the law. Susan B. Anthony was hardly alone in voting illegally in the presidential election of 1872. In 1868 in Vineland, New Jersey, a group of 172 women, both black and white, went to the polls on presidential election day. In 1870 the famous antislavery feminists Sarah and Angelina Grimke cast their votes in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. Between 1870 and 1872 (a time when only the new western territories of Utah and Wyoming had enacted woman suffrage), over 100 women tried to register and vote in the District of Columbia and states throughout the nation — from Dover, New Hampshire, to Detroit, Michigan, to Santa Cruz, California. Stopped at the polls, women took the suffrage case to the courts, where they challenged state officials’ refusal to let them vote. From Pennsylvania to Illinois to California, the courts ruled against woman suffrage. In the 1874 case, Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not enfranchise women, rejecting the feminist claim that suffrage was intrinsic to citizenship. A year earlier in the landmark constitutional case, Bradwell v.Illinois, the Supreme Court had announced its views on gender: “the civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be woman’s protector and defender.” According to the Court, “timidity and delicacy... belongs to the female sex” and “the domestic sphere... properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood.” The Supreme Court was as unreceptive to woman suffrage as were state legislatures and Congress.

For decades the notion that women and men were naturally different and should occupy separate spheres blocked the path to woman suffrage. Throughout their long careers, Stanton and Anthony challenged this idea, decrying a legal system that defined “equal rights” as the watchword of human freedom but that denied woman’s enfranchisement in the name of gender difference.