Ch. 4.1. Women and the Constitution: Women as Citizens
(Continued from Lewis.)
The question of counting women when apportioning representatives was bound up in a matter the Framers found much more compelling, the issue of how to count slaves. While there was no discussion about including women when apportioning representatives, the Framers vigorously debated whether and how to count slaves; these discussions are quite revealing about what the delegates thought about the question of representation in general and who should be represented in particular. The slavery issue and one other, balancing the competing claims of the small and large states, were the most difficult ones the Convention faced; each threatened to send the delegates home without a plan for a national government.
And both of these thorny issues touched upon the overarching question of representation. Any debate about counting slaves or small versus large states soon brought the delegates into discussions not only about very practical considerations, such as which of their states might benefit, but also theoretical views on the nature of representation in a republic. These more abstract discussions yield some clues as to what the delegates had in mind when they simplified James Wilson’s original language. In fact, if we follow Wilson himself through the debates in the Convention, his original intention in adding the language about sex becomes much more clear.
Even before he suggested the wording about “age, sex, and condition,” Wilson had developed before the delegates his own theory of representation. Early in the proceedings, on June 9, Wilson “entered elaborately” into a defense of proportional representation. Representation should be based upon population; ”as all authority was derived from the people, equal numbers of people ought to have an equal number of representatives.” It was only two days later that he introduced his amendment to add the additional words, including the terms “of every age sex and condition,” as well as the three-fifths clause. In this context, then, it seems evident that Wilson intended women to be included among the people, from whom “all authority was derived.” In Wilson’s mind, at least, women were included in the “We the People” who authorized the Constitution.
At this particular moment in the deliberations, Wilson was engaged in a debate about whether representation in the lower house should be based upon wealth or population. Hence, Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry immediately objected to Wilson’s amendment, addressing the three-fifths clause and asking, “Why then should the blacks, who were property in the South, be the rule of representation more than the cattle & horses of the North.” Gerry did not, however, contest Wilson’s suggestion that women should be included among the people who were to be represented. Nor did any of the other delegates who would argue about the proper basis for representation. Pierce Butler of South Carolina would continue to argue that “property was the only just measure of representation. This was the great object of government: the great cause of war, the great means of carrying it on.”
Although conservative nationalists such as Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris agreed that “property was the main object of society,” he was troubled by the South Carolinians’ desire to include slaves as part of the population. He thought that the Three Fifths Compromise was “an incoherence. If negroes were to be viewed as inhabitants… they ought to be added in their entire number, and not in the proportion of 3/5.” If instead, slaves were being counted as a measure of wealth, then the delegates should acknowledge that representation was being based upon population and property both.
Wilson recognized the contradiction that Morris pointed out. He could not “see on what principle the admission of blacks for purposes of representation could be explained. Are they admitted as citizens? Then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property? Then why is not other property admitted into the computation?”
Earlier New Jersey’s William Paterson had made the same point even more explicitly. He “could regard negroes as in no light but as property. They are no free agents, have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but on the contrary are themselves property, & like other property entirely at the will of the Master.” After neatly distinguishing between slavery and freedom, Paterson went on to lay out his theory of representation.
What is the true principle of Representation? It is an expedient by which an assembly of certain individuals chosen by the people is substituted in place of the inconvenient meeting of the people themselves. If such a meeting of the people was actually to take place, would the slaves vote? They would not. Why then should they be represented?
Although women could vote only in New Jersey, and children were not admitted to the polls anywhere, Paterson made no objection to including them in the basis for representation.
In some clear, if unspecified way, women were members of political society in ways that slaves simply were not. While Wilson recognized the inconsistency of counting slaves, he was willing to compromise on this issue for the sake of the federal union. He would never concede, however, that “property was the sole or the primary object of government and society.” To the contrary, ”the cultivation & improvement of the human mind was the most noble object. With respect to this object, as well as to other personal rights, numbers were surely the natural & precise measure of representation.”
Now we can see what Wilson had in mind when he added the words “age sex & condition” to the resolutions the delegates were debating. If the purpose of government and society was not property, but the improvement of the human mind and the protection of other personal rights, then surely women must be included.
Although Wilson’s intent seems clear enough, the delegates never commented upon Wilson’ s wording or the place of women in the government that they were creating. We may infer from their silence, however, a general acceptance of Wilson’s reasoning, if not an understanding of its practical application. These delegates were alert to–and spent a long summer debating–the subtlest shifts of meaning. Surely, then, someone would have noted and objected to Wilson’s formulation had it seemed problematic for the purposes at hand. The implications of Wilson’ s wording on slavery, in contrast, were very much contested, and there the delegates could achieve no common understanding.
The Three-Fifths Compromise, as Wilson suggested, was a compromise both on the place of slavery in the new nation and on the proper basis for representation; in a document that everywhere else insisted that persons, not property, were to be represented, the compromise inserted the principle of the representation of wealth. James Madison would later attempt to wrest a logic out of this “incoherence” by arguing in The Federalist Number 54 that the Constitution intentionally recognized slaves’ “mixed character of persons and property.” “This is in fact their true character,” Madison asserted. And “if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.” By necessary implication, women, who were counted fully, were to be represented fully as well.
In none of these discussions was it argued that slaves, free blacks, women, or children should vote, although in some states free blacks and in one women were exercising the franchise. Instead democrats such as Wilson and Madison believed that all free inhabitants were part of the “imagined community” that they called the United States. They drew a distinction between being a member of the nation or community, which they called civil society, and voting. Every state in the new nation restricted the suffrage on the basis not only age, sex, race, and freedom, but also wealth as well. Not even all adult white men could vote.