From Women’s E-News: http://womensenews.org/story/our-history/130322/states-rights-also-code-keeping-women-down
The term has served as a legal code for racism. Today, historian Doris Weatherford writes that state lawmakers have also long imposed legal restrictions on U.S. women. Now it’s the framework for the shrinkage of access to reproductive health care and medical privacy.
By Doris Weatherford
Monday, March 25, 2013
(WOMENSENEWS)–Throughout U.S. history, “states’ rights” was a convenient code for racism.
Conservative politicians railed that legal changes in favor of African Americans were a violation of “states’ rights.” Southerners especially contended that their state legislatures had a right to laws that discriminated against people born with the wrong skin color.
Yet rarely is the phrase states’ rights seen also as a code to legitimize the violation of women’s rights, even though every woman gains or loses the right to make decisions about her own body when she crosses state lines.
Just last week, North Dakota lawmakers banned the termination of pregnancies that are beyond six weeks–when a woman barely knows whether or not she has missed her period.
Because men cannot get pregnant, such laws do not apply to them, and the conflict between women’s rights and states’ rights continues.
The legal point should have been resolved by the 14th and 15th Amendments in the 1860s, but a century passed before the majority of Americans agreed that the federal government should overrule racially discriminatory state laws. A hundred years after the Civil War ended in 1865, nonwhites finally saw the promise of true liberty with the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.
While almost everyone today sees states’ rights as an antiqued philosophy, astonishingly few see that it also is key to understanding women’s rights. Historians don’t teach it that way, and so this vast aspect of U.S. history goes unacknowledged.
From the nation’s beginning, though, statehood meant a step backwards for most women. In the colonial era of the 1600s, women freely went to court and argued their own cases. But under new state governments, many women lost their right to sue.
Continue reading at: http://womensenews.org/story/our-history/130322/states-rights-also-code-keeping-women-down
