We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

by Jill Lepore

“Our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics,” Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Anne Willing Bingham in Philadelphia in May 1788.1

The constitutional exclusion of women could be said to follow from the common-law doctrine of coverture, under which married women were “covered” by their husbands: legally, they did not exist. A feme covert could not own property, agree to a contract, or sign a legal document.