The Woman's Hour

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all citizens. This amendment became a source of contention in the South after the Civil War because it allowed the Federal Government to interfere in states that issued restrictive anti-Black codes and Jim Crow laws. The Antis frequently invoked the Fourteenth Amendment in conjunction with the Nineteenth Amendment as a dire warning: Both would guarantee federal interference in state government. 

The Nineteenth Amendment ensures that women who are citizens of the United States have the right to vote in all states. Even though many states had already legalized women’s suffrage, this right had never been granted at the federal level. Since many of the states withholding the franchise were in the South, the ratification battle in Tennessee carried weighty regional significance.

After the Civil War, as the North attempted to restructure the South in Reconstruction, a process directed by Congress, the South perceived the newly set up free labor economy and the protection of freedmen’s rights as abuses. With the South still smarting from this violation of the slavery status quo, the prospect of the Nineteenth Amendment raised fears of new upheavals in the power dynamic, with men losing status and falling pretty to “petticoat government.