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The U.S. Women's Jury Movements and Strategic Adaptation: A More Just Verdict

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jat089

1945-2314

Serena Mayeri,

Jury Decision Making Processes

The conventional periodization of American feminism locates the first wave of activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, building upon and eventually diverging from the abolitionist movement and culminating in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Feminism's second wave, according to this account, built upon post–World War II civil rights victories and women's rising labor-force participation to achieve significant triumphs in the 1960s and 1970s. The interim period, sometimes referred to as the doldrums, is said to have featured a divisive struggle among advocates for women over whether to pursue a federal equal rights amendment that would establish formal legal equality, or instead to improve women's status through other means, sometimes emphasizing women's differences from men to preserve sex-specific protective legislation. Holly J. McCammon's study of women's twentieth-century jury activism complicates this stylized narrative along several dimensions. McCammon uses archival sources and press accounts from fifteen states to reconstruct jury movements' efforts to win for women the right to serve on juries in state criminal and civil trials. Her research reveals that women's organizations, most prominently state branches of the League of Women Voters and the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, engaged in sustained jury rights activism at the state level during the period between the first and second waves. Largely overlooked by historians and social-movement scholars, this advocacy attracted significant attention and press coverage from local media and succeeded—sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly—in lifting long-standing state restrictions on women's presence in the courtroom as active participants in the administration of justice.