In a classroom packed with people, all the women but one were wearing pants. The lecturer, Linda Kerber, is a professor. The women she teaches have the right to vote.

Many of those rights grew out of the grassroots feminist movement of the last generation, said Kerber, a history professor and law lecturer at the University of Iowa. She also is author of “No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship.”
And she doesn’t let her students get away with telling her “as time went by, women’s rights improved.”

“Times don’t just change ... someone made a fuss,” she said.

Kerber is a scholar of some magnitude, and it was a rare opportunity to have her come to the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, said Kendall Staggs, a UW-L history professor.

Speaking in a classroom crammed with people Sept. 25, Kerber said American women throughout history regularly have been denied equal protection under the law.

As she detailed the many moments in history that should matter to women, dating back to when the country was founded, I thought about my right to vote in the upcoming election.

In 1875, the Supreme Court told Virginia Minor that not allowing her to vote didn’t deny her equality under the law, Kerber said.

It wasn’t until 1971 that the high court truly began to shift in recognizing sex discrimination, said Kerber.

As late as 1974, only four states allowed married women to have separate domiciles from their husbands, and not until 1975 did the Supreme Court rule men and women must be eligible for jury service on the same terms, Kerber said.

“I didn’t realize how recent this fight for men and women’s equal rights was,” said Eva Ennamorato, a UW-L freshman who attended the lecture.

Kerber noted that as recently as 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress in 2003, which marked the first time justices agreed a specific abortion procedure could be banned.

Kerber pointed out Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her dissent that the court “deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”

She concluded her talk by saying, “Every debate about abortion is a debate about the meanings of equality.”

No matter what your views on that topic, Kerber is right that women should know more about constitutional history — and the fight behind it — than just when they earned the right to vote.

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