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Changing the Constitution
Women’s Suffrage.
A delegation of ‘‘Suffragettes’’ appearing before the Judiciary Committee of the House
of Representatives in 1871 to argue that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments
granted women the right to vote. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
slaves. The Fifteenth Amendment does not technically give blacks the
right to vote as such, but instead informs the States that race cannot be
one of the factors it uses in determining voter qualifications. In effect,
however, the Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court confers a
right to vote upon all blacks who otherwise meet a State’s eligibility standards regarding such matters as age and residency. The Supreme Court
has also held that the right extends beyond the general election to primary elections.
Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment repeats the Enforcement Clause
language of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments. Congress rarely
used this power before it enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its
ensuing amendments. Under this Act, Congress abolished literacy tests
and racial gerrymandering, thereby prohibiting the Stat