AFTER SUFFRAGE:
THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF FEMINIST LEGAL ADVOCACY on research by
S E R E N A M AY E R I Professor of Law and History
“Long before scholars spoke of intersectionality, Murray theorized how women of color shouldered uniquely heavy burdens and provided underappreciated leadership in movements for racial justice and women’s liberation.”
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In her essay “After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy,” published in the Yale Law Journal Forum, Serena Mayeri provides a nuanced account of post-Nineteenth Amendment feminist organizing through the lens of racial and gender justice advocate Pauli Murray. Mayeri demonstrates that Murray was “a largely unsung architect of second-wave feminism’s legal and constitutional strategy.” Though the women’s suffrage movement, which culminated in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, grew out of the anti-slavery movement, the “abolitionist-feminist alliance” fractured during the Reconstruction era. Notably, the Fourteenth Amendment referred to “male” citizens’ right to vote, and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits race- but not sex-based abridgment of voting rights. In the decades that followed the Nineteenth Amendment’s passage, some white suffragists relied on racist rhetoric, arguing that women’s rights would function as “an antidote to the voting power of black, immigrant, poor, and disabled men” and they “rebuffed African Americans who continued to fight for women’s right to vote.” Murray, born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1910, “resolved to fight the ‘twin inequalities’ of Jim and Jane Crow.” Rejected in 1938 by the University of North Carolina because of race and by Harvard Law School in 1944 because of sex, she earned law degrees from Howard University, Berkeley, and Yale. As a member of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, Murray wrote “a founding document of modern feminist constitutionalism,” which Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited with laying the intellectual groundwork for her own Supreme Court constitutional litigation strategy a decade later. While some activist white women “saw racial-justice movements as competitors, even antagonists” in the early 1960s, Murray sought to unite feminism and racial justice by suggesting that advocates organize an “NAACP for women” in pursuit of equal rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. She centered women of color in her successful behind-the-scenes campaign to win passage of an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit sex-based employment discrimination, writing another pivotal memo that circulated widely among senators and the Johnson administration. Murray challenged both male civil rights leaders as well as white feminists: she protested the exclusion of Black women speakers from the dais of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and two years later called for a women’s March on Washington if the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) failed to enforce Title VII’s sex discrimination prohibition. “Murray’s calls for a coalition between white women and people of color spoke to multiple audiences: civil-rights leaders wary of white feminists’ flirtations with segregationists; white women preoccupied with sex equality at the expense of racial justice; black and working-class women skeptical that women’s interests aligned across race and class,” Mayeri writes. “By identifying intersecting axes of inequality, Murray sought to persuade those who believed their interests to be divergent that they shared a common cause.”
