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The Daily Signal
What Patricia
Arquette Got Wrong About the Founders and Women
David Azerrad
February 23, 2015
In a harried Oscar acceptance speech which culminated in a hackneyed
call for wage equality, actress Patricia Arquette blamed the Founders
for the so-called gender pay gap.
“It’s inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal
rights for women in other countries when we don’t have equal rights for
women in America,” Arquette, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting
Actress, said. “And we don’t because when they wrote the Constitution,
they didn’t intend it for women.”
Like many Americans, actress Patricia Arquette doesn’t understand the
Constitution (she also doesn’t understand basic economics as The
Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway pointed out).
If the Framers didn’t intend the Constitution for women, they sure did
a fine job of concealing their intention. Nowhere in the original
Constitution are citizens classified according to sex. As Tiffany Jones
Miller explains in the “Heritage Guide to The Constitution” essay on
the 19th Amendment:
Don’t have time to read the Washington Post or New York Times? Then get
The Morning Bell, an early morning edition of the day’s most important
political news, conservative commentary and original reporting from a
team committed to following the truth no matter where it leads.
Contrary to popular belief, the United States
Constitution of 1787 is a gender-neutral document. Throughout the
original text, the Framers refer to “persons”—as opposed to “male
persons”—and use the pronoun “he” only in the generic sense. The word
“male” did not even appear in the Constitution until the Fourteenth
Amendment was ratified in 1868.
While we’re at it, it’s worth pointing out that the Declaration of
Independence also doesn’t take into account sex in proclaiming that we
are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable
rights. The Declaration speaks of “all men” and not “all human beings”
because the former is a more rhetorically powerful way to describe
mankind.
Women were voting in New Jersey at the time of the
Founding! For the first time in recorded history, women voted alongside
men in elections.
Neither one of our founding documents classifies people according to
sex—or according to race or religion for that matter. Therefore,
contrary to what many civics textbooks incorrectly teach, the original
Constitution did not restrict the right to vote to white,
property-owning males aged 21 or older.
The Constitution defers to the states on voting eligibility in federal
elections. As is plainly written in Article I, Section 2: “the Electors
in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of
the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.”
As a result, voting eligibility varied by state. Certain states denied
blacks the right to vote—but a majority did not. And—here comes the
whopper—women were voting in New Jersey at the time of the Founding!
For the first time in recorded history, women voted alongside men in
elections. And it happened right here in America—the first country in
the world dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are
created equal.
The 19th Amendment, therefore, did not give women the right to vote. It
guaranteed women the right to vote. By the time it was ratified in
1920, more than three-fourths of the states already allowed women to
vote in some or all elections. Ultimately, the seeds of women’s
suffrage were sown in the Declaration of Independence’s dedication to
equality.
Whatever the state of remuneration in the workplace may be today,
Patricia Arquette and others should leave the Founders out of it.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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