Customer Reviews

No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship

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This is an absolutely fascinating book. The material in it is interesting, detailed and very well written. She uses legal cases as a starting point to discuss women's civic obligations. It becomes very clear that people's obligations have an enormous effect on their rights and the roles they are expected to play in society. The individual cases help keep things grounded in people's lives and not just legal theories. There is an amazing amount of information that I never knew which really helped me understand how things were and how they changed.

One case study was two women who felt that they were being charged more in property taxes that the other land owners in the area. They decided to stop paying property taxes using the slogan "no taxation without representation". These two women had received training in political activism with the abolition and temperence movements which was common among the people who worked for women's sufferage. The "no taxation without representation" was one of the first legal arguments used to try and obtain voting rights for women and initially it was a strong one. It had certainly worked to increase the various classes of men that were allowed to vote. With women, unfortunately, the courts chipped away at the legel precident rather than following it. This one case allowed Ms. Kerber to talk about how women were hurt by being kept out of the political system, the women's sufferage movement, and the response of the courts and politicians.

This book gave me an immense amount of food for thought. I highly recommend it.

This is that rare history book that can keep one up late, utterly unable to wait til the next day for the end of the story. Kerber focuses on little-known women and their conflicts with government over their rights and obligations as citizens: loyalty during wartime, voting, serving on juries, paying taxes. She brings these stories to life with dramatic, clear writing. If you're interested in American history, don't miss this book

I have read a lot of women's and Constitutional history, and still my jaw literally dropped open several times while reading this book. Her use of real scenarios made the book readable and enjoyable. People have said lately that we are focused too much on our rights and not our responsibilities; it's scary to see that whether women must bear the responsibilities of citizenship is still in many ways an open question.

I'm definately interested in reading and understanding more about the situation women face today. This book was an incredibly informative education on the evolution of debate about what exactly is a woman's place in society. It helped clarify vague confusion I've felt about things being not yet fully equal, but not having the background or vocabulary to explain why.

This book would probably work best as a text for a Woman's Studies or Civil Rights class; For the casual historian, it's a bit dense--but very interesting. The author focuses on court cases, from early Massachusetts to the modern Supreme Court, as a stepping stone to examine various obligations (as opposed to rights) that were denied women from the start, right up to the present (or 1999 when the book was written). These run from taxes and voting, to juries and finally, the draft. The court cases are a stepping off point to examine the attitudes of the day and the origins of the laws and those attitudes. Because African American civil rights often parallels the women's rights movement (which at the start were almost exclusively for white women's rights) the reader gets some details on life above and below the Mason Dixon line in the Jim Crow and Slavery eras. This information will often prove quite eye-opening to the average person if they haven't studied either movement in detail.

In essence, a white woman was supposed to be something between an ornament and an appliance, but always to keep to the home. Black men, women and children, on the other hand, were expected to work outside the home, and in the South even had to sign annual contracts for labor of the sort that could be seen, and watched; quantified. Vagrancy laws often brought fines equal to two months salary, and the laws were so broad it was hard to avoid them--being dressed up was no less of a risk than being down and out, but the laws invariably ensnared only black people. Juries, of course only took white men, and even when white women began to serve, white men could often get their convictions overturned as a result. Oddly enough, while women couldn't vote, they did have to pay taxes if they were single (usually widowed) and owned property, and often they ended up getting assessed more than male taxpayers. And did you know that a woman born in the US, to American parents could still lose her citizenship if she married a foreigner, and moved abroad? That case has never been overturned (as of 1999 in any case!)

Where I thought the book went wrong was in the information-overload. The early chapters, which focused on the early republic, had sources that had been edited by the passage of time. As the case histories come closer to the modern age, the information becomes much more abundant and the author throws a lot more of it into the chapter, even if it doesn't really help the reader to understand context or precedent. The final chapter on the Draft was so windy with words I had to fight myself in order to actually read it all and not put it down and say I had. A bit more judicious editing and this very good book would be a much more compelling read. Still, if you want to see how fluid our system still is, and how little has been carved into stone--so much less than you'd imagine, "No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies" would be a very good place to start.

This isn't a very interesting book. I read it for a class and couldn't see myself ever picking it up for pleasure, or even even for further academic research. The topic is too narrow and the author fails to tell a broader story.