Who Gets to Judge? The Forgotten History of Women and Juries

Females were not even mentioned in our founding Constitution. Males dominated its creation, influenced by Mr. Jefferson’s “… all men are created equal” – (except of course Black men who ended up Constitutionally defined as 3/5ths of a human).

Until August of 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified, all women had been created invisible. And that Amendment gave them only a single right: to vote. All other rights came slowly.

For instance, the right for women to serve on juries was still restricted in New York State five years later, when Alice Jones Rhinelander was sued for fraud. She was falsely accused of having claimed she was white as she enticed her wealthy husband into marrying her. The jury she faced was made up of twelve white men – hardly a gathering of her peers who were without prejudice. She and her lawyers accepted those realities, and fought to overcome them. The result was what the New York Times called, “The Trial of the Century.”

Not until the Civil Rights Act of 1957 were women assured they could serve on federal juries uniformly across all states. Mississippi became the last state to make women eligible for state juries in 1968. The U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled gender-based exclusion from jury duty unconstitutional nationwide in 1975. And not until 1994 did the Supreme Court fully ban gender-based strikes in jury selection.

And then there’s the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Passed by Congress in 1972, the ERA guarantees that equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. It required ratification by three-fourths of the states. Virginia became the 38th and final state needed to ratify it in January 2020. Even so, it is being held up from becoming the 28th Amendment to the Constitution by legal curlicues. Stay tuned.