and housing has provided many stigmatized groups legal redress.
Generally, discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, color,
national origin, marital status, disability, or, in some cities and
states, sexual or affectional preference, is banned. This broadening of civil-rights protection to many stigmatized groups was the result of political activism, legislative initiatives, and many, many
lawsuits. It was not simply decreed one bright day because it was
right and bigots had recognized the error of their bad ways.
It is especially important to understand that
Black women and that
Black people as a whole or women as a whole are discriminated against or hurt, Black women are denied rights. (For instance, when Blacks were given the vote, but women were
excluded, Black women could not vote. )
Women have benefited greatly from civil-rights legislation
and litigation when discrimination has taken the form of exclusion because of sex, especially in employment. When the pat erns of sex discrimination resemble those of race discrimination, especially as they developed under segregation, civil-rights law offers remedies. But when injuries on the basis of
sex are distinct and different—as, for instance, in systematic
sexual abuse—there are no effective civil-rights remedies in
law even though basic rights of citizenship and personhood
are being denied or violated.
The Meaning of Civil Rights
1
The legal history of women’s rights in the United States is
appalling.
Put in the simplest terms: women were the chattel property
of men under law until the early part of the twentieth century.
Married women could not own property because they were
property. A woman’s body, her children, and the clothes on
her back belonged to her husband. When the husband died,
another male, not the mother, became the legal guardian of
the children. The body of a married woman belonged to her
husband just as a slave’s body belonged to the white master.
A single woman was under the legally formidable authority of
her father or other male relatives. Mar ied women were what
nineteenth-century feminists called “civil y dead. ” Single
women sometimes paid taxes. No women had rights of citizenship. Women did not have a constitutionally protected right to vote until 1920.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was
ratified in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment is unique in the
Constitution. It is an equality-based amendment; it says that
equality under the law is a right. The Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments gave Black men the vote. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizens equal protection under the
law. The Fourteenth Amendment intentionally excluded
women. * Only in 1971 did the Supreme Court hold that
women too were entitled to the equal protection under the
law promised by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The banning of discrimination on the basis of sex in the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a partial and mean af air. Trying
to defeat the whole Civil Rights Act, racist Southern Congressmen proposed to add
* Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment indudes the fol owing: “But when the
