The Massachusetts Legislature is considering whether to amend state constitutional language that describes the governor and lieutenant governor as “His Excellency” and “His Honor,” respectively. The proposals are to add either female pronouns or both female and gender-neutral ones. Prompted in part by the election of a historic women executive team — Governor Maura Healey and Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll — this change would symbolically honor women’s long fight for equal political rights in Massachusetts.
Just over 150 years ago, the Supreme Judicial Court issued a striking and influential opinion: Women in the Commonwealth were legally ineligible to hold public offices. The governor had requested the justices’ advice because he wished to appoint prominent suffragist Julia Ward Howe as a justice of the peace (a low-level judicial officer), and the state constitution did not clearly answer whether this would be lawful. The court’s 1871 opinion was brief yet definitive in the negative. The “universal understanding and unbroken practical construction” of the state constitution, the opinion stated, was that women were excluded from holding any constitutionally defined office.
Jurisdictions from Maine to Wyoming Territory had permitted women to serve as justices of the peace and other offices starting a few years earlier. But after the Commonwealth’s high court came out in opposition, a strong countertrend developed. For instance, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court cited Maine’s shared history with Massachusetts to hold that women there were also ineligible to hold office. For the next half century, women across the nation sued and lobbied for the right to hold public offices, ranging from school superintendent to state legislator. State supreme courts divided, with those in the Northeast and South especially likely to point to history and constitutional text to conclude that women could not hold public offices.
People who sought to exclude women from office sometimes cited male pronouns in constitutions and statutes to claim that lawmakers intended to limit offices to men. From small-town newspapers to the halls of Congress, men pointed to “he” in relevant laws to argue against women’s officeholding eligibility. Though rarely a successful legal tactic standing alone, this stance added rhetorical strength. Reinforcing the idea that pronouns were meaningful, women’s rights proponents occasionally pointed to the absence of male pronouns in some states’ officeholding rules to support women’s inclusion. Others maintained that male pronouns should be read as gender neutral. This lack of clarity and consistency regarding pronoun interpretation was one of many hurdles women faced in demanding officeholding rights.
Massachusetts was among the slowest states to extend political rights to women. Into the mid-1910s, after around a dozen states and territories had granted women full voting and officeholding rights, Massachusetts allowed neither. Even women’s modest efforts to extend their rights failed. For example, in 1914, the state’s male voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed women to serve as notaries public. Women finally achieved this limited victory in 1918, but they still could not hold most offices or vote in the Commonwealth.
After ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution granted women equal suffrage across the nation in 1920, politicians in Massachusetts continued to question whether women could hold public offices. This time it was the state Senate that requested the Supreme Judicial Court’s advice. The court replied that the 19th Amendment did not automatically confer officeholding rights on the state’s women.
However, the federal amendment eliminated the word “male” from the state constitution’s language governing the right to vote, and it followed by implication that sex-based restrictions on officeholding should disappear. Going forward, women could hold all offices within the Commonwealth. Still, uncertainty about women’s eligibility for the nation’s highest offices lingered. As late as 1928, a Boston Globe columnist noted the possibility that the pronoun “he” in the US Constitution could render women ineligible for the presidency, though she assessed this result as “almost out of the question.”
Although male pronouns never served as a legal bar to women’s officeholding in Massachusetts, the state constitution’s language serves as a reminder of women’s long exclusion and inequality. The proposed amendments could instead send the message that the Commonwealth embraces equal political participation by all.
Elizabeth D. Katz is a visiting professor of law at Boston College Law School and an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of “Sex, Suffrage, and State Constitutional Law: Women’s Legal Right to Hold Public Office.”