“They Are All She Had”
Formerly Incarcerated Women and the Right to Vote, 1890–1945
PIPPA HOLLOWAY
Many people believe that women in the United States were granted the right to vote in 1920 following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, but Mollie Mullins of Tarpon, Virginia, understood that the history of women’s suffrage in America was more complicated. Mullins, a white woman, had been convicted of misdemeanor larceny in 1906. Larceny was a disfranchising offense in Virginia, and Mullins, like many other women in Virginia, remained excluded from the polls during the 1920 election due to her previous criminal conviction.1 Women with criminal convictions were, of course, not the only women denied this aspect of democratic participation. African American women, along with black men in Virginia and many other Southern states, were disfranchised through literacy tests, poll taxes, and other practices. Across the nation, Hispanic and Latina women, Native American women, and disabled women also faced significant barriers to exercising their full rights of citizenship before and after 1920. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment had little immediate impact on access to the ballot for these women.
The experiences of women like Mollie Mullins offer a more nuanced view of the history of women’s suffrage, but their stories also offer a way to explore the legal and cultural connections between race, gender, and criminality.2 Female convicts have been overlooked in the academic literature on the history of mass incarceration generally and in studies of felon disfranchisement in particular. One exception is Talitha LeFlouria’s examination of the history of female convict laborers in the New South. LeFlouria demonstrates how women’s experiences as convict laborers differed from those of their male counterparts and proves that foregrounding gender can bring new insights into our understanding of this brutal system. Using the lens of gender, she identifies both connections and discontinuities between the system of racial slavery that marked the pre–Civil War South and the system of Jim Crow that emerged after.3 This chapter takes a similar approach by bringing gender into the analysis of felon disfranchisement to make women visible in the historical narrative and highlighting their particular experiences while also offering a means to consider the legal and philosophical connections between disfranchising women and convicts.
Suffrage was the most visible and public expression of citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States. On the eve of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the three largest populations cast out from suffrage were women, African Americans, and convicted criminals. Individuals who were convicted of serious crimes were infamous and excluded from suffrage and some other rights of citizenship in most states. Infamy, a term that connected one’s legal and social status, described a state of degradation and dependence that was incompatible with full citizenship. This included enslaved people, convicts, and, in the eyes of some, women. The model for full citizenship, the individual who could exercise and enjoy all the privileges of citizenship, was the free white man. After 1865, when the Fourteenth Amendment promised the rights of citizenship to African American men, white Southern Democrats sought to keep African American men degraded, dependent, and disfranchised. The criminalization of both African American individuals and the black race played an important role in maintaining their disfranchisement and exclusion from full rights of citizenship.4 White advocates for women’s suffrage, frustrated by the failure of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to extend the vote to women, sought to separate women from other disfranchised groups as part of the process of elevating them to full citizens deserving of the vote.
A consideration of the experiences of women with criminal convictions illuminates the intersecting regional and national histories of mass incarceration. The central arguments of this book, that Sunbelt states have a unique history with regard to mass incarceration and that the history of this region can provide insights into the larger national story, are both affirmed and challenged by a focus on the disfranchisement of female convicts. Women in the Sunbelt shared experiences with men in the region when they faced a criminal justice system built on legacies of enslavement, violence, and racialized notions of citizenship. But women who were disfranchised due to incarceration and prior felony convictions shared the experience of continued exclusion from suffrage after 1920 with women across the nation.5 The legal and ideological connections between the disfranchisement of women and of people with criminal convictions are part of a national story in which white Southerners played a central role with their insistence that citizenship was reserved for those who were neither dependent nor degraded—in other words, free white men.
The denial of suffrage to individuals with criminal convictions has a long history. Traditions of suffrage and citizenship date back to the earliest days of democracy, where Greece, Rome, and then later other European countries barred women from the vote. Laws disfranchising for crime in the United States have their origins in the legal concept of infamy established under Greek and Roman law. In the ancient world, and then later across early modern Europe, a conviction for certain crimes resulted in infamy, which brought the loss of the status and privileges of citizenship. In addition to the possible punishments of incarceration, forfeiture of property, corporal punishment, and banishment, convicted individuals might lose the right to vote, although not all had suffrage rights to begin with as suffrage was not a universal right. An infamy judgment might also restrict individuals from being able to testify in court, bring civil prosecution, serve on juries, hold public office, or enlist in the army. Infamy removed an individual’s honor and nullified the respect and privilege due him as a citizen.6
In the early nineteenth-century United States, the franchise was expanded for white men but contracted for other elements of the population. Alexandar Keyssar’s sweeping history of American suffrage points out that most states eliminated property requirements for suffrage in the first half of the century, so that on the eve of the Civil War no state used property requirements to disfranchise white men. But many states began to create constitutional obstacles to suffrage for other groups. In some states where property-owning women had access to the vote, laws now formally excluded them from the franchise. Although some free African Americans had been able to vote in certain parts of the nation, they too were legally disfranchised in all Southern states. And many states erected constitutional and statutory bans on voting by certain classes of convicts. These three populations joined other citizens who were excluded from suffrage in the Western democratic tradition—children and people with mental disabilities—in legally and constitutionally being denied the vote.7
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was a landmark in the definition of American citizenship. This amendment is rightfully remembered as extending citizenship to all people born in the United States, thereby eliminating the legal distinction between enslaved and free individuals. America now recognized all native-born individuals as citizens and granted them certain rights. However, the Constitution still did not grant political rights—including suffrage—to all.8 The Fourteenth Amendment excluded both women and convicts from being guaranteed access to the vote by excluding both populations from protection in Section Two, the apportionment section: “But when the right to vote at any election … is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”9 Although this provision was intended to penalize states that denied African Americans suffrage, specifying that only male citizens should be guaranteed the vote was a blow to women’s suffrage advocates who had hoped Congress would take this opportunity to expand suffrage to all citizens regardless of gender.10 Section Two also affirmed (at least in the eyes of recent jurisprudence) disfranchisement for crime by exempting states that disfranchised “for participation in rebellion, or other crime” from the punishment of reduced representation. In short, states could disfranchise women and those with criminal convictions with no legal repercussions.11
The Fourteenth Amendment’s allowance of disfranchisement for criminal conviction and gender but not race promoted a new, postslavery, understanding of citizenship. Citizenship and its full privileges—for men at least—would no longer be based on race.12 But what qualities would now determine eligibility for the full privileges of citizenship? Historian Laura Free has argued that suffrage and full citizenship became dependent on manhood—a characteristic shared by black and white men but one that required the formal exclusion of women.13 Others have suggested that disfranchising for crime was essential to the revised philosophical underpinnings of eligibility for suffrage. Legal scholars Christopher Re and Richard Re argue that allowing states to disfranchise for crime was the logical counterpart to enfranchising all men regardless of status. Since criminal acts and acts of rebellion could lead men to lose the full privileges of citizenship, individuals would now be judged based on their voluntary actions instead of status or wealth, an egalitarian ideology that reflected the principles of the day.14
Both of these analyses are missing critical elements. Free fails to analyze the amendment’s allowance of disfranchisement for criminal conviction. Re and Re downplay the significance of the disfranchisement of women, calling Section Two’s reference to gender a “political necessity” rather than philosophical principle.15 Some philosophical principal must have been operational, however, for gender-based discrimination to have been an option even for these politically pragmatic framers; excluding an analysis of gender in this way risks naturalizing gender-based discrimination.
The exclusion of convicts and women from political citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment was central to the kind of citizenship envisioned by the congressional majority. Citizenship was framed in opposition to infamy and conditions of dependence and degradation. The disfranchisement of both women and convicts rested on the same principle. Both populations experienced a kind of civil and social degradation long considered incompatible with full citizenship and suffrage. Both groups were seen as lacking the full independence and agency associated with manhood. For much of history, women, or at least married women, were not fully able to exercise their rights as citizens under the legal tradition of coverture. Under this legal tradition, a married woman’s rights were subsumed by her husband, and she had few, if any, rights as an individual. Similarly, incarceration caused convicts to be subjugated to the state, so that men who had been incarcerated were reduced to a kind of dependence and humiliation. Indeed, this was part of the tradition of infamy. Individuals who had suffered humiliating punishments were seen as being degraded and thus losing the respect owed to citizens.16
Suffrage and full citizenship, originally privileges of white manhood, now faced expansion. Those granted the suffrage and the respect of citizenship had to be free and self-governing. In the eyes of Republicans and those who supported the Fourteenth Amendment, this included formerly enslaved men who were no longer dependent, subservient, degraded, and enslaved. Women’s unequal citizenship was, in contrast, affirmed by the new amendment. But women and convicts were similar in another way. The social construction of manhood involved self-control and a willingness to delay gratification.17 Women’s lack of self-restraint was considered an element of their femininity. Convicts, like women, lacked a key component of manhood. Theft demonstrated impetuousness, and certain kinds of violence might indicate inability to control anger.18 The provision in the Fourteenth Amendment disfranchising convicts and women fits within the contemporary understandings of what qualities characterized male citizens deserving of the full rights and respect of manhood. The exclusion of these two groups from full citizenship was not coincidental and disconnected but stemmed from the same philosophical principles.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s sanction of disfranchisement for “any crime” set the stage for an expansion of these laws in the next few decades. Soon after the amendment’s passage, Southern states modified laws disfranchising for crime to target African American voters. Between 1874 and 1882, all Southern states except Texas amended their constitutions and revised their laws to disfranchise for petty theft. These revisions were part of a larger effort to disfranchise African American voters and to restore the Democratic Party to political dominance in the region.19 These laws and practices were affirmed in Southern legal and constitutional changes throughout the late nineteenth century. Southern states maintained the legal tradition of infamy, perpetuating the idea that certain kinds of degradation, particularly the degradation of criminal punishment, should bring about lifelong disfranchisement. The mutually defining relationships between slavery and infamy, between African Americans and convicts, among those in a degraded race, those degraded by punishment, and those whose crime evidenced degradation, were incubated in the region so that they became part of the legal and intellectual tradition of modern America.
Lifelong denial of suffrage for criminal convictions expanded across the nation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the same time that the nation debated women’s suffrage. All of the new states added to the union between 1889 and 1912, except Utah, disfranchised felons or individuals convicted of infamous crimes in their first constitutions.20 As the nation debated the merits of extending voting rights to women, the denial of the vote to convicted individuals offered a point of comparison. Both advocates and opponents of women’s suffrage made connections between the disfranchisement of convicts and women.
Those who opposed extending voting rights to women drew on the existence of laws disfranchising for crime to support their anti-suffrage stance. Such was the strategy of Tennessee attorney John J. Vertrees, who published an anti-suffrage pamphlet titled An Address to the Men of Tennessee on Female Suffrage in 1916. Vertrees surveyed the existing state of suffrage restrictions nationwide to buttress his argument against enfranchising women. Vertrees pointed out that many groups in society had civil rights but lacked political rights. “The women, children, aliens, infamous persons, and corporations of Tennessee are all ‘citizens’ of Tennessee, and as such have their citizenship but they do not vote.” Such individuals, he explained, were citizens “in a personal and civil sense” and therefore had various rights of citizenship. The fact that they were denied political rights did not contradict the fact of their citizenship. Men, though, were given an additional set of rights—political rights. “The men of Tennessee over twenty-one years of age, who are not aliens, and who have not been rendered infamous, do vote because they are ‘citizens’ in the political sense. They are the ‘people’ in the political sense.”21
Vertrees used the contemporary consensus on the disfranchisement of felons (along with aliens and minors) to prove his point. He believed that advocates of women’s rights had conceded that political rights might be abridged for some citizens in some circumstances. “Even the suffragettes do not protest against the disfranchisement of minors, felons and aliens. This in fact is an admission that considerations apart from personal or individual right may be and indeed are controlling.” The disfranchisement of individuals with criminal convictions proved, according to Vertrees, that the right to vote was a political, not a natural, right.22
Women’s suffrage advocates found arguments for the enfranchisement of women in these same laws, ultimately using the connections between women and criminals to support their message of women’s enfranchisement. They asserted that the disfranchisement of women put honorable and dignified female citizens in the same position as convicts. Elizabeth Cady Stanton referenced this comparison on several occasions. She found it “humiliating” that “respectful, law-abiding women” were “thrust outside the pale of political consideration with traitors, idiots, minors, with those guilty of bribery, larceny and infamous crime.” She asked, “What a category is this in which to place your mothers, wives and daughters?”23
When political leaders in New York debated women’s suffrage at the 1867 constitutional convention, women’s suffrage supporter George William Curtis complained that opponents of women’s suffrage “politically class the women of New York with idiots and criminals.” In fact, Curtis said, women were even more humiliated than other groups because “the lunatic may emerge from the cloud and resume his rights; the idiot … may be moulded into the full citizen; the criminal may be pardoned and restored.” However, nothing could “remove from woman this enormous and extraordinary disability”24—nothing but giving women the right to vote, of course. Daniel Parker Livermore’s 1885 pro-suffrage book explained, “As the law now stands idiots[,] felons[,] lunatics[,] and women are excluded from the polls! Giving the ballot to worthy intelligent women will lift the wives[,] mothers[,] daughters[,] and sisters of our intelligent citizens out of the category of lunatics, idiots and felons!”25
This rhetoric by which women’s suffrage was promoted through a strategy of denigrating the voting rights of other supposedly unworthy groups is at times highlighted in public commemorations of the movement in the present. In 2015, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, unveiled the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial in downtown Knoxville. The statue features quotes from suffrage advocates, including Tennessee activist Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, who was the state’s delegate to the National Suffrage Convention in 1879. The quote from Meriwether chronicles her reaction after she was barred from voting at an election in 1876 due to her gender: “But counting my ballot was not important; what was important was to focus public attention to the monstrous injustice of including educated women with felons and lunatics as persons denied the right of suffrage.”26
Even when the issue of women’s suffrage was not in the forefront of discussion, the comparison between women and other disfranchised groups was part of the debate over the parameters of citizenship in the post–Civil War era. Such was the case at Ohio’s 1873–1874 constitutional convention. At this gathering, delegates considered granting voting rights to certain unnaturalized immigrants. Delegate Lewis D. Campbell of Butler County, who opposed extending the franchise to any individual who was not naturalized, explained that he would endorse women’s suffrage before he would support extending the franchise to unnaturalized populations. “I would give nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine to woman before I would give one to aliens, including felons and paupers.” Campbell went on to use his own mother as an example. She was, he asserted, well educated, she paid taxes, she was the daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran, and she was the wife of a veteran of the War of 1812. Yet she could not vote. “Would it not seem a great injustice to such a woman—and there are very many others having claims equal to hers—to enfranchise foreign paupers and felons and not confer it on her if she desired it?”27 Whether one supported or opposed expanding the franchise to include women, the legitimacy of disfranchising individuals with criminal convictions went unquestioned. This is one of many indications of the widespread endorsement of punishing convicted individuals with such sanctions in this era.
Even though they could not vote in most U.S. states, women with infamous convictions faced other collateral consequences of convictions, as was illustrated by an Illinois case in 1910. That year, the Illinois Supreme Court heard an appeal by a woman named Jennie Russell. Russell had been convicted of petty larceny, sentenced to four months’ imprisonment in the Chicago House of Correction, fined one dollar, and rendered infamous. Russell appealed her conviction, claiming that the municipal court lacked authority to hear the case. At issue was whether the infamy judgment meant that she was being punished for an infamous crime; if so, the lower court should not have had jurisdiction over the case.
Ruling in her favor, the court took the opportunity to opine on the subject of infamy. Infamy, traditionally, has meant the loss of rights of citizenship and voting rights. As a woman in Illinois in 1910, Russell did not have the right to vote, but the infamy judgment still constituted a penalty. The court explained: “The plaintiff in error is a woman and the rights she has lost are more restricted than those of a man; but they are all she had and a man could lose no more.”28
More evidence that legislators recognized the impact of postconviction disabilities of citizenship on women in the era before which women had the right to vote can be found in a North Carolina law passed in 1840. The statute spelled out the process of “restoring persons to citizenship” following a criminal conviction and infamy judgment. The statute referred to citizens with the male pronoun throughout but added a special provision in Section Five: “Females may have the benefit of this act as well as males.”29
Women did, indeed, have some rights to lose. In many states, individuals with certain criminal convictions faced limitations on their ability to act as a witness in judicial proceedings, meaning that they could not testify in certain court cases.30 Women would have also suffered collateral consequences of conviction with regard to holding certain professional licenses. Illinois, for example, denied individuals with convictions that indicated “moral turpitude” from serving as attorneys.31 In Maryland, those convicted of infamous crimes could not serve as insurance brokers.32 In Arizona, Texas and eight other states, convicted felons could not obtain medical licenses.33 In Missouri, individuals who were disfranchised were denied the ability to hold a liquor license.34 In California, those with infamous convictions could not serve as the executor of a will.35 Although these laws did not distinguish on account of gender, men would have been affected more often by them because in this period men were far more likely than women to be licensed attorneys, insurance brokers, physicians, bartenders, and so forth.
Convicted individuals were barred from holding public office, though this, too, would have rarely affected women prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. However, there is one remarkable exception to this: Hawai’i Queen Liliuokolani—the last reigning monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. In 1887, the king of Hawai’i, King Kalākaua, was forced by a group of wealthy American sugar planters to sign a new constitution. Referred to by some as the “Bayonet Constitution,” this document sought to lay the groundwork for the annexation of the Hawaiian islands into the United States by stripping the monarchy of authority and depriving native Hawaiian men of political power. The list of suffrage restrictions imposed under this constitution should be familiar to those with a knowledge of techniques for disfranchising African Americans in the U.S. South in this period: literacy tests, property requirements, residency requirements, and a provision barring individuals from suffrage or office if they had been convicted of any of an enumerated list of crimes.36
Queen Liliuokolani inherited the throne from her brother in 1891 and took on the planter class by refusing to recognize the Bayonet Constitution. She restored the monarchy and advocated the rights of native Hawaiians to control their land. In 1893, American-born sugar planters, with assistance from American troops, overthrew the queen’s government. A group of European and American businessmen formed the new “Republic of Hawaii” and sought American annexation. In 1895, after a failed attempt by Royalist supporters to restore the monarchy, the government’s militia arrested the queen, charging her with treason. This conviction, under the terms of the new constitution, deprived her of the right to hold political office.
In 1895, in what has since been interpreted as an effort to calm tension on the island, Sanford B. Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaii, granted the queen a pardon. It was not simply a pardon to release her from house arrest but a “full and free pardon” with an explicit “restoration to her civil rights.” The queen later offered this account of how her pardon transpired: “One day in the month of October, 1896, while with trowel in hand I was separating and transplanting my ferns at my Waikiki residence, Major George C. Potter entered, bearing a document, which on examination I found purported to be an entire release of all restrictions, an absolute pardon, and a restoration of my civil rights. This, to be sure, places me in the same position as before my arrest and trial; but let me ask, if I was deprived of my civil rights at the moment of my imprisonment, of what value was the signature procured to my supposed or alleged act of abdication? Was it legal, of binding force, or effective?”37
Queen Liliuokolani was right to wonder about the value of the pardon. It did not restore her to the monarchy. Although the pardon technically lifted the civil sanctions that followed her conviction and restored her right to hold political office, the political situation on the island made this impossible. In fact, in 1898 the island’s planter elites succeeded in obtaining U.S. annexation, fully cementing their authority over the native islanders. However, the release from house arrest enabled the former queen to leave the island and travel to the United States.
Although this instance of the restoration of civil rights for a former female convict was largely symbolic and did not allow her to vote or hold office, it is nonetheless a landmark. Queen Liliuokolani may well have been the first woman to have her civil rights restored postconviction in the United States (defined as present or future states). But in this era, the right to pardon and restoration of citizenship rights was, increasingly, known and exercised. Curtis’s observation at New York’s 1867 constitutional convention that some groups could be redeemed and restored to suffrage also indicated his awareness of the process of restoring voting rights to those who had been disfranchised for crimes. Many states established and regularized this process in this era, and growing numbers of individuals who faced a lifetime of disfranchisement due to their criminal convictions sought pardons to restore their citizenship rights. The history of restoring the rights of citizenship in this period follows in many ways the more general story of pardons and clemency. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many states worked out constitutional and bureaucratic procedures by which convicted individuals might be relieved of punishment and sanctions. Growing adherence to legal formalism and the more rigorous use of constitutions to articulate the extent of government power—what historian William Novak has called a “cult of constitutionalism” emerging after the Civil War—as well as the push toward standardization and bureaucratization in the Progressive Era led states to establish formal constitutional and legal processes for restoring rights.38 The process varied from state to state, but most states required a written application and an endorsement of this application in the form of a petition signed by fellow citizens. In most states, governors granted pardons, but some states required judicial or legislative action.39
Women, with the exception of Queen Liliuokolani, rarely sought pardons to restore citizenship rights before they were granted the right of suffrage. This was most likely due to the fact that because women were barred from participation in most elections in this period, the civil consequences of criminal conviction were lesser for them. But in the aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment, growing numbers of women sought pardons. These pardons offer insight into the experience of individuals disfranchised for criminal convictions in the early twentieth century.40
Missouri was an early “partial suffrage” state—women were allowed to vote there in the 1919 presidential election before the federal suffrage amendment passed. This may explain why two Missouri women can be found in some of the earliest records of petitions for restorations of voting rights. Anna Hunning, who lived in Valley Park Missouri, sought access to the franchise with particular urgency. Convicted of murder and sentenced to life in 1912, she was released on parole in 1919. Her parole expired on January 1, 1921, and on January 3 she submitted a petition to Governor Frederick Gardner for restoration to citizenship. The petition was a standard document on a form printed by the state for such occasions. Those who signed the document supporting the petitioner attested that “his conduct has been that of a good citizen.” On Hunning’s form, someone crossed out “his” and substituted “her.”41 Clearly, Missouri was not yet prepared for petitions for restoration of citizenship from female applicants.
About six months later, Missouri governor Arthur Hyde heard from Cora Blackwell, who was convicted of aiding and abetting and assisting a rape in St. Louis in 1903 when she was twenty-two years old.42 She was sentenced to five years in the penitentiary and was released in 1907. In July 1921, she petitioned for a pardon so that she could have her citizenship rights restored. Her petition listed her employment as a “house wife” and was signed by twenty individuals.43
Although neither Blackwell’s nor Hunning’s requests for citizenship restoration included signatures from individuals who can be identified as their husbands, both of their petitions were signed exclusively by men. These earliest petitions from women, filed soon after the passage of the national suffrage amendment, indicate the extent to which men were still gatekeepers of citizenship. Similarly, another convicted woman’s effort to restore her of citizenship via a filing in Virginia two years later featured a high level of involvement by her husband.
In 1923, a white man named G. W. Mullins, from the tiny mountain town of Tarpon, Virginia, wrote to Governor E. Lee Trinkle. Mr. Mullins asked the governor to restore voting rights to his wife, Mollie, whose story began this chapter. Enclosed with his letter was a petition signed by nine local men, including an attorney, sheriff, and county clerk. J. C. Smith, the commonwealth attorney in nearby Clintwood, also wrote to the governor supporting Mrs. Mullins’s case. “I am well acquainted with Mrs. Mullins and her husband and all their family relation and they are people of integrity and well respected by all the people who know them. Mrs. Mullins has lived an upright and good life since her conviction and it gives me great pleasure to recommend to you Mrs. Mullins as a lady worthy of the favor to have her disabilities removed that she may exercise the rights of suffrage.”44 In praising the reputation of her family and by identifying her as a “lady,” a term coded with race and class, Smith sought to affirm her social standing and worthiness of the ballot.
In Florida, some of the earliest petitions for restoration of citizenship by women also involved family or marital connections. In 1928, in Baker County, Florida, four members of the Harvey family—two men and two women—were convicted of perjury. Three years later, all had completed their sentences or received conditional pardons, and together they applied for unconditional pardons for the purpose of restoring their citizenship rights.45 Similarly, marriage connected Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Conner; they were convicted, together, of murder in Gilchrist County, Florida, in 1928. The governor granted them conditional pardons, releasing them from prison, about a year later. Then they both applied for, and received, full pardons, restoring them to full rights of citizenship in 1931.46
There is some evidence that by the 1930s, men were no longer the gatekeepers of citizenship, at least for the purposes of attesting to the fitness of others. In 1932, an African American woman named Annie Tassin contacted the Missouri governor to request restoration of her citizenship. According to the form Tassin submitted, she had been convicted of “burglar [sic] in second degree.” For date of conviction she wrote, “Can’t remember exactly.” Her enclosed petition was endorsed by ten female signatories along with fourteen men. Still, though, the state’s petition form had not changed; Tassin, like Hunning elected to cross out the “his” and changed it to “her.”
Tassin wrote a letter to the governor to accompany her petition, and in it she suggests an additional reason to have her citizenship restored. She explained that she would “love to have her citizenship back, for it means so much to me in my life to live.” Why was it so important? For one, she “want[ed] to live a true life.” In addition, she told the governor that she sought a pardon because she was “identified by so many organizations.” Tassin’s comments indicate that being disfranchised for a prior criminal conviction affected her social status in the community. Organizations she had joined—likely women’s clubs and benevolent organizations—must have frowned on her criminal past, and so she sought to have her record cleared as much as possible.47
Being a registered voter may have, in fact, even been a requirement for Tassin’s membership in some organizations. African American civic and benevolent organization did, at times, use such techniques to encourage political participation by their members. For example, the Baltimore Afro American reported in 1920 that in Florida, “churches and fraternal organizations including the Masons and Elks required all members to pay their poll taxes and register to vote before they became members in good standing.” According to the newspaper, these groups “insisted” that despite threats of violence, “members go to the polls and make an effort to vote.”48 Women’s groups, too, encouraged participation by their members. In the 1940s, some branches of the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs also encouraged political involvement, including voting and participation in elections by their members. The national organization gave local branches awards for civic engagement, and one of the criteria for this award was that “every member votes in primaries.”49
Tassin’s letter emphasized that citizenship encompasses more than the rights to vote, testify, run for office, or obtain professional licenses. Having the full rights of citizenship, including the right to suffrage, can engender social respect, authority, and dignity. The language used to describe the importance of full citizenship and suffrage in Tassin’s letter illustrates the social burden imposed on those who were denied citizenship. Being restored to citizenship might reestablish honor and dignity to an individual. Restoring an individual’s civil rights did not merely remove a final criminal penalty. Restoring an individual to civil and political equality restored him or her to social equality.
Of course, this was also the point made by advocates of the women’s suffrage movement and defenders of African American voting rights. For activists in both groups, voting was not an end in itself but a step toward social transformation. Women’s involvement in elections might alter politics, and political engagement would alter women’s position in society. Similarly, the struggle for African American voting rights in the South during Reconstruction was recognized by both supporters and opponents of black suffrage to be a step toward racial equality. Many Americans understood the many layers of value that suffrage brought.
Petitions for restoration of citizenship by California women in the early 1930s indicate the variety of impacts beyond disfranchisement that a criminal conviction could have on one’s life. In 1931, Blanche Welch sought restoration of her citizenship rights nearly four years after her conviction for burglary and after serving fifteen months in prison. The state parole officer wrote encouraging the governor to agree to her request, noting, “I am forced to be somewhat charitable in her case, and for that matter to any woman who has served a penitentiary term. They have much more to contend with and their difficulties to surmount are much harder than those of a man.” Welch’s conviction appears to have not only prevented her from voting but affected her ability to secure custody of her daughter. The public defender assigned to her case explained that a pardon would allow her to “have restored to her again her 17-year old daughter”; the chaplain at the Los Angeles jail agreed, saying a pardon would allow her to “bring her little girl up in a proper manner.” Under California law, a court could deny custody to a parent whose child was a ward of the court if the parent had a criminal conviction. Furthermore, the conviction may have prevented Welch from obtaining a job that would allow her to support herself and her child.50
Efforts by African American women with criminal convictions to vote offer evidence of particular determination to overcome multiple barriers to suffrage. Such was the case of Mary Cole, who lived in Jefferson City, Missouri, and sought restoration of her citizenship rights in 1930. Cole’s petition was accompanied by a letter to the governor from the prosecuting attorney in the county—a white man named Otto Ankersheil. Ankersheil wrote that Cole and her husband were “old colored people who came into this county from Arkansas and had not been in the state but about nine months.” Ankersheil explained that a candidate for a local election had sought their vote and drove them to the polling place, where they voted. Because they were recent migrants and not eligible to vote, they were arrested. Ankersheil concluded, “In my opinion it was purely a matter of ignorance on the part of these old darkies being persuaded to vote by a white man in whom they put confidence and there was no intention on their part to violate the law.”51
Their story changes dramatically if you give Cole and her husband the credibility of agency. Here is another version of the tale: as soon as they got out of Arkansas, as soon as they left behind a state where white Southern Democrats denied them suffrage, the Coles were so determined to vote that they convinced a white politician to drive them to the polling place. Then, charged with being ineligible to vote, they blamed their crime on this white politician and chauffeur and sought the restoration of their citizenship rights, gathering signatures and securing the sympathy and support of the local prosecutor, Ankersheil. With her citizenship now restored, Cole could now again participate in an election. One suspects that within the year she did exactly that.52
Female convicts who petitioned for the restoration of their citizenship rights seem to have been a fairly diverse lot, both in terms of the crime they committed and their social class. One might assume that those convicted of lesser crimes would be more successful in getting their citizenship rights restored. That is to some extent true today—states often make restoration of rights more difficult for individuals with certain kinds of more serious charges.53 However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governors and pardon boards did not seem particularly concerned about the kind of crimes committed when restoring citizenship. Women who succeeded in obtaining restoration of voting rights had faced a variety of criminal charges—murder, rape, burglary, larceny, arson, and election fraud. The only case I have found of an application for restoration being opposed was the case of Hannah Ashkenazy, who was convicted of performing an abortion in 1921. When she applied for restoration of citizenship in 1932, the state parole officer expressed hesitancy to recommend her based on the nature of her crime. Her conduct in prison was “exceptionally good,” he reported, but he was entirely unsympathetic to practitioners of abortions, as these procedures often had “terrible results” due to “bungling and inexperienced practitioners.”54
Women seeking restoration of their voting rights came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. For example, in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, Mrs. Hay Long Wall, a white woman who had been convicted of arson in 1930, successfully petitioned the county court for the restoration of her citizenship in 1945.55 Wall had owned a movie theater and was convicted of deliberately setting it on fire to collect insurance money. She was from the city’s elite class; her father had donated land for a local school, which the city named after her.56 In contrast, many of the Missouri women appear to have been members of the working class. Annie Tassin, for example, listed her occupation as “laundress,” and her petition indicates she also worked as a maid. In Missouri, lower-class individuals faced an additional challenge obtaining restoration of citizenship because the state had the unusual requirement that petitions for restoration of citizenship be signed by “at least twenty reputable citizens … six of whom should be personally known to the Governor.”57 Individuals personally known to the governor would mostly likely be members of the upper class. This requirement explains why many Missouri petitions have six signatures from people who might be identified as upper or upper middle class, while the remaining ones appear to be working class. For example, the first six signatories on Blackwell’s petition list middle- or merchant-class professions—coal dealer, blacksmith, barber, and merchant. Of the remaining fourteen, many simply listed “labor” as their profession. Hunning, too, had six middle- to upper-class signers: a mailman, butcher, blacksmith, merchant, and Catholic priest. The rest were “farmers.” Annie Tassin listed twenty-four individuals, most of whom were professionals. At least three of them were families she worked for as a laundress. She also had a signature from the courthouse janitor.58
Letters recommending women for restoration of citizenship used gendered language to recommend them. For example, when California parole officer Ed Whyte wrote to recommend Myrtle Kinney for restoration of voting rights, he noted that she was “Not vulgar or low—quite the contrary—somewhat shy and wistful possessing a certain feminine sweetness, with no little charm and a personality that makes real friends of those whom she meets.”59 Similar to the aforementioned letter referring to Virginia’s Mollie Mullins as a “lady,” this recommendation for Kinney affirmed her qualification for suffrage by emphasizing a gender identity that was rooted in class.
Felon disfranchisement was not at the forefront of the debate over citizenship in the nineteenth century, but it was always in the background. Many Americans felt that convicted felons should be disfranchised, and there was, thus, little to debate. A consensus on the legitimacy of felon disfranchisement rested on historical antecedents as well as particularly American understandings of race, class, and criminality in the late nineteenth century. The women’s suffrage movement did not have an expansive view of suffrage, as even some opponents of suffrage pointed out. Their record of support for African American suffrage was mixed, and there is no evidence that they supported the enfranchisement of ex-felons, male or female, either. In fact, as we have seen, the argument for women’s suffrage rested, in part, on the idea that the disfranchisement of women sullied them by classing them with criminals. Women with criminal convictions, however, recognized the impact of disfranchisement and other civil sanctions on their lives. In the years after 1920, many of these women sought access to the ballot and equal citizenship.
One of the most important current trends in criminal justice in the United States is the increasing number of women experiencing criminal convictions and incarceration. In the past decades, the number of women in jails and prisons increased by more than 700 percent, from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 215,332 in 2014.60 Whereas 11 percent of all individuals arrested were women in 1960, in 2014 women were 26 percent of arrests.61 Today, incarcerated women are disproportionately women of color, are an average age of early to mid-thirties, and are most likely to be incarcerated for nonviolent crimes—primarily drug offenses and property crimes.62
Individuals with felony convictions face a broad spectrum of collateral consequences of their conviction, including barriers to employment and the denial of public housing, child custody, welfare benefits, food stamps, and financial assistance for education.63 In the majority of U.S. states today, individuals on probation and parole cannot vote, and twelve states permanently disfranchise some or all ex-offenders. As a result, approximately 5.85 million individuals are disfranchised due to a felony conviction.64 Although some of these disfranchised individuals are incarcerated, the majority are either under correctional supervision (probation or parole) or have fully completed their sentences but remain disfranchised under state laws. Thus, disfranchisement extends beyond the period of confinement in the corrections system—and in some instances extends through an individual’s entire life.
What scholar Michelle Alexander has called “the new Jim Crow”—a system of mass incarceration that is re-creating a racial caste system—has thus far affected black men most directly.65 Black men have the highest rates of incarceration, leading Alexander and others to compare the current practice of mass incarceration to the system of Jim Crow segregation. Black men are hit the hardest by felon disfranchisement laws today; about 13 percent of the adult black male population is disfranchised due to criminal convictions, a rate more than seven times the national average.66
As increasing numbers of women face the penalties that come with a felony conviction, more and more women are experiencing disfranchisement for criminal conviction, as well as other collateral consequences of criminal convictions. Today, over 792,200 women cannot vote due to a felony conviction, about 0.71 percent of the female voting age population, or one in 141 women. African American women are disfranchised at nearly four times the rate of women of other racial groups because they are disproportionately incarcerated and convicted.67 Hispanic women also face disparate impacts of these laws because they are incarcerated at about 1.5 times the national average.68 Women are increasingly suffering from the impacts of mass incarceration. It is thus particularly important to look at the historical record to consider the experience of women in the past who faced postconviction civil penalties, including the denial of suffrage, as well as to look at how gender and criminality intersected along the historic path of American citizenship.
Recognizing convicted criminals as political actors and perceiving them as individuals who struggled to obtain political rights gives a snapshot of political engagement by individuals usually excluded from the narrative of American politics. Efforts by women disfranchised for criminal convictions to vote demonstrate that the women’s suffrage movement, and in particular the victory achieved with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, inspired diverse women who remained excluded from the franchise after 1920 to fight for suffrage. Although other historians have documented the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment in renewing voting rights activism by African American women in the South, it is notable that this amendment prompted women with criminal convictions to make their case for full rights of citizenship as well.69 Today many believe that former convicts are disinterested in politics and unlikely to vote. The stories of formerly incarcerated women from the early twentieth century demonstrate a legacy of political activism from women who worked alone to achieve for themselves what the organized women’s suffrage movement had promised.
Notes
1. The Commonwealth of Virginia ratified a constitutional amendment in 1876 to make misdemeanor larceny a disfranchising offense. “The Constitutional Amendments,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 8, 1876, 3; Virginia Constitution (1870, amended 1876), art. 3, sect. 1.
2. Foregrounding the experience of women with criminal convictions and others who were not enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment challenges what Steven Lawson and Nancy Hewitt have called the “myth of universal women’s enfranchisement.” Nancy A. Hewitt and Steven F. Lawson, “The Myth of the 19th Amendment,” Slate, August 15, 2016, http://
3. Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
4. Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen point to the racial roots and implications of felon disfranchisement laws, arguing that many Southern states passed these laws after the Civil War. See Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a different account of these laws that centers the racial origins of felon disfranchisement on the idea of infamy and traces the legal roots of these laws to the 1820s and 1830s, see Pippa Holloway, Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
5. Laws disfranchising for criminal conviction varied from state to state, but in 1920 the vast majority of U.S. states disfranchised some or all individuals convicted of felonies. See Holloway, Living in Infamy.
6. Holloway, 3–16.
7. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22–60; Holloway, Living in Infamy, 17–32. Native Americans, too, were disfranchised in this period, but because they were not considered U.S. citizens, the rationale for their exclusion from suffrage was different.
8. Katherine Irene Pettus, Felony Disenfranchisement in America (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004) 89, 108–10.
9. U.S. Constitution, amend. XIV, §2.
10. Laura Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
11. Richardson v. Ramirez, 418 U.S. 24 (1974).
12. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 26–30. In a few locations, property-owning women had access to the vote prior to changes in suffrage requirements that specified voters must be men. Keyssar, 53–67.
13. Laura Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 2015). See also Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which argues that race and gender are simultaneously organizing principles and products of citizenship and labor. Glenn’s work makes key connections between political citizenship and social citizenship, a point that illustrates the larger implications for the narrower focus here on the political rights of citizenship, specifically suffrage.
14. Christopher Re and Richard Re, “Voting and Vice: Criminal Disenfranchisement and the Reconstruction Amendments,” Yale Law Journal 121 (2012): 1584–670.
15. Re and Re, 1616.
16. For a more thorough discussion of these ideas, see Holloway, Living in Infamy, 1–32.
17. On self-restraint, masculine citizenship, race, and class, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. 45–52.
18. Michael Meranze argues that an important goal of incarceration in nineteenth-century Philadelphia was to teach criminals self-control. See Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
19. Pippa Holloway, “ ‘A Chicken Stealer Shall Lose His Vote’: Disfranchisement for Larceny in the South, 1874–1890,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 4 (November 2009): 932–62.
20. North Dakota Constitution (1889), art. V, § 127; South Dakota Constitution (1889), art. VII, § 9; Washington Constitution (1889), art. VI, § 3; Montana Constitution (1889), art. IX, § 2; Idaho Constitution (1889), art. VI, § 3; Wyoming Constitution (1889), art. VI, § 6; Oklahoma Constitution (1907), art. 2, § 43; New Mexico Constitution (1912), art. VII, § 1; Arizona Constitution (1912), art. VII, § 2.
21. John Vertrees, “An Address to the Men of Tennessee on Female Suffrage,” in Votes for Women!: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 206–7.
22. Vertrees, 206–7.
23. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage: 1861–1876, vol. II, (Rochester, NY: Charles Mann, 1887), 189, 275 (“humiliating”).
24. History of Woman Suffrage, 288–89.
25. Daniel Parker Livermore, Woman Suffrage Defended by Irrefutable Arguments: And All Objections to Woman’s Enfranchisement Carefully Examined and Completely Answered (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1885), vi.
26. See “Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial,” http://
27. Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohio, vol. 2 (Cleveland: W. S. Robison, 1874), 1802–3.
28. People v. Russell, 91 N.E. 1075 (1910).
29. North Carolina Acts of 1840, chapter 36, in James Iredell, A New Digested Manual of the Acts of the General Assembly of North Carolina, the Year 1838 to the Year 1850 Inclusive (Raleigh: Seaton Gales, 1851), 93.
30. Many states had such laws in the early nineteenth century, though most states had eliminated them by 1890. Pippa Holloway, “Testimonial Incapacity and Criminal Defendants in the South,” in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South, edited by Natalie Ring and Amy Wood (University of Illinois Press, 2019), 107–29.
31. For a discussion of Illinois law at this time on disbarment for criminal conviction, see People ex rel. Johnson v. George, 186 Ill. 122 (1900). See also “Effects of Pardon on Disbarment of Attorney,” in Law Notes, vol. 16 (New York: Edward Thompson, 1913), 185–87.
32. Maryland Laws of 1916, chapter 255, § 184c.
33. “Licensing Boards Empowered to Revoke Licenses and On What Grounds,” American Medical Association Bulletin 3, no. 2 (November 15, 1907): 80–87.
34. “No person shall be granted a license hereunder unless such person is of good moral character and a qualified legal voter.” Revised Statutes of Missouri, 1939 (St. Louis: Midland Printing Company, 1940).
35. California Code of Civil Procedure, chapter III, art. 1, § 1350, cited in The Code of Civil Procedure of the State of California, 551.
36. Hawaii Constitution of 1887, art. 73: “The following persons shall not be permitted to register for voting, to vote, or to hold office under any department of the Government, or to sit in the Legislature, namely: Any person who is insane or an idiot, or any person who shall have been convicted of any of the following named offenses, viz: Arson, Barratry, Bribery, Burglary, Counterfeiting, Embezzlement, Felonious Branding of Cattle, Forgery, Gross Cheat, Incest, Kidnapping, Larceny, Malicious Burning, Manslaughter in the First Degree, Murder, Perjury, Rape, Robbery, Sodomy, Treason, Subornation of Perjury, and Malfeasance in Office, unless he shall have been pardoned by the King and restored to his Civil Rights, and by the express terms of his pardon declared to be eligible to offices of Trust, Honor and Profit.”
37. Liliuokalani (Queen of Hawaii), Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani (Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1898), 303–4. See also Robin L. Bott, “ ‘I Know What Is Due to Me’: Self-Fashioning and Legitimization in Queen Liliuokalani’s Hawaii’s Story,” in Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142.
38. On development and standardization of pardon procedures in this period and observations about the increase in pardons in this era, see Vivien M. L. Miller, Crime Sexual Violence and Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 134–37; William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 246–78.
39. For more on the history of pardons for restoration of citizenship rights see Holloway, Living in Infamy, 105–31.
40. I have located petitions for restoration of citizenship from ten states between 1865 and 1945: Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Missouri, and California. Although the majority of pardons to restore citizenship went to men, I have found a small number of women who were restored to suffrage in the twenty-five years after the Nineteenth Amendment. Researching pardons to restore citizenship is a very labor-intensive process, and I have not undertaken a systematic accounting of these sources. My analysis here is therefore based on anecdotes and qualitative examinations. No quantitative conclusions should be drawn from these data.
41. Petition of Anna Hunning, January 3, 1921, Restorations of Citizenship, box 114, folder 6, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri.
42. Case file for The State of Missouri vs. Cora Blackwell, October Term 1903, case file 78, Circuit Court Case Files, Office of the Circuit Clerk—St. Louis, Missouri State Archives—St. Louis, Missouri. I am grateful to Michael Everman at the Missouri State Archives—St. Louis for locating this case file for me.
43. Petition of Cora Blackwell, July 16, 1921, Restorations of Citizenship, box 114, folder 8, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri.
44. J. C. Smith to E. Lee Trinkle, May 3, 1923, File of Mollie Mullins, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Executive Papers, record group 13, box 630, Virginia State Library and Archives, Richmond, Virginia.
45. Minutes of the State Pardon Board, RG690, series 187, vol. D, 75–76, Florida State Library, Tallahassee, Florida.
46. Minutes of the State Pardon Board, RG690, series 187, vol. D, 103, Florida State Library.
47. Petition of Annie Tassin, January 3, 1921, Restorations of Citizenship, box 114, folder 6, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri.
48. “Disorders Mark Florida Election,” Baltimore Afro American, November 5, 1920, 1.
49. Kathleen A. Laughlin, “Civic Feminists: The Politics of the Minnesota Federation of the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs during and after World War II,” in Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations, and Feminism, 1945–1985, ed. Kathleen Laughlin and Jacqueline Castledine (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–33.
50. John H. Hill to Edward H. Whyte, March 3, 1931; Ira E. King to Ed H. White, March 2, 1931, in Restoration of Citizenship for Blanche Welch, Message of the Governor Concerning Pardons, Commutations, and Reprieves (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1933), 48–51; General Laws, Juvenile Court Law, section 9b, in California Laws of Interest to Women and Children, 1917 (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1918), 221. Parents could also lose custody for “gross immorality.” California Civil Code, “Guardian and Ward,” § 253, California Laws of Interest to Women and Children, 1917, 40
51. Petition of Mary Cole, June 30, 1930, Restorations of Citizenship, box 120, folder 6, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri.
52. Petition of Mary Cole.
53. For example, in Florida, a 2018 constitutional amendment provided for automatic restoration of the franchise following the completion of all court supervision for all felons except for those convicted of murder or sexual offenses. “Florida Eases Voting Ban for Felons, Giving 1.4 Million a Second Chance,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 2018, F14. In Alabama, some classes of convicts can never have their voting rights restored. This includes individuals convicted of murder and rape, as well as a long and varied list of sex crimes, including sodomy, incest, possession of obscene matter, or enticing a child to enter a vehicle for immoral purposes. Code of Alabama, Section 16-23-5.
54. Ed H. Whyte to James Rolph, January 28, 1932, Restoration of Citizenship of Hannah Ashkenazy, Message of the Governor Concerning Pardons, Commutations, and Reprieves, 131.
55. Maury County Circuit Court, Criminal Minutes, vol. 18, November 28, 1930, 483 (arson conviction); Maury County Circuit Court, Civil Minutes, roll 17, vol. 15, June 22, 1945, 285 (restoration of rights), Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.
56. William Bruce Turner, History of Maury County, Tennessee (Columbia, TN: Parthenon Press, 1955), 76.
57. This is the language printed on the petition form in Missouri in this period.
58. Petitions of Annie Tassin, Cora Blackwell, and Anna Hunning.
59. Ed H. Whyte to James Rolph, April 20, 1932, Restoration of Citizenship of Myrtle Kinney, Message of the Governor Concerning Pardons, Commutations, and Reprieves, 153.
60. The Sentencing Project, “Fact Sheet: Incarcerated Women and Girls,” http://
61. Elizabeth Swavola, Kristine Riley, and Ram Subramanian, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform, (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2016), 23. https://
62. Natasha Frost, Judith Greene, and Kevin Pranis, HARD HIT: The Growth in Imprisonment of Women, 1977–2004 (New York: Women’s Prison Association, 2004).
63. For a summary of the collateral consequences of incarceration, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 137–72. Other work on collateral consequences includes Eric Blumenson and Eva S. Nilsen, “How to Construct an Underclass, or How the War on Drugs Became a War on Education,” Journal of Gender Race and Justice 6, no. 1 (2002): 61–109; Michael Pinard, “An Integrated Perspective on the Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions and Reentry Issues Faced by Formerly Incarcerated Individuals,” Boston University Law Review 86, no. 3 (2006): 623–90; Ann Cammett, “Shadow Citizens: Felony Disenfranchisement and the Criminalization of Debt,” Penn State Law Review 117, no. 2 (2012): 349.
64. Jean Chung, “Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer,” Sentencing Project, May 10, 2016, http://
65. Alexander, New Jim Crow, 1–19.
66. Maine and Vermont are the only two states that have never disfranchised for criminal conviction. In 2011, thirty-five states disfranchised individuals on parole, and thirty also disfranchised those on probation. Forty-eight states (all except Maine and Vermont) disfranchised individuals in prison. The Sentencing Project also finds that “Each state has developed its own process of restoring voting rights to ex-offenders but most of these restoration processes are so cumbersome that few ex-offenders are able to take advantage of them.” Sentencing Project, “Felony Disfranchisement Laws in the United States,” http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/fd_bs_fdlawsinusDec11.pdf. See also Manza and Uggen, Locked Out.
67. Christopher Uggen, Sarah Shannon, and Jeff Manza, “State-Level Estimates of Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 2010” (Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, July 2012), http://
68. “Democracy Imprisoned: A Review of the Prevalence and Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States” (Washington, DC: Sentencing Project, September 2013), http://
69. Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).