The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution had left women, sex, marriage out of it. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had warned her husband in 1776, advice he had ignored. The consequences of writing women out of the republic’s founding documents were both lasting and devastating. That the framers of the Constitution had not resolved the question of slavery had led to a civil war. That they regarded women as unequal to men nearly did the same. Over the course of American history, women had often written themselves into the Constitution by way of analogy. Discrimination by sex was like
...more
