Noah Feldman, Columnist

Voting for a Female President Isn't So Radical Now

But the Founding Fathers would have been confounded.

November 8, 2016 at 6:35 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Thank the suffragists.
Photographer: Paul Thompson/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

No matter the outcome, this Election Day marks a signal moment in the history of women’s suffrage. The Founding Fathers had a bad conscience about slavery, but no such qualms about women’s rights. The movement for women’s suffrage didn’t begin until the 1840s. And after the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment was proposed to give blacks the vote, women’s groups splintered over whether the denial of voting rights to women was a reason to oppose the amendment. Today, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a moderate, centrist reformer, is the political descendant of the women’s suffrage movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

At the time of the American founding, voting rights for women was not yet a major national issue. But the idea was not unthinkable. In 1778, the Virginian Hannah Lee Corbin wrote a letter (now lost) to her brother, the patriot and politician Richard Henry Lee, arguing that as a widow in possession of property, she ought to have the right to vote just as much as a property-owning man.