ABSTRACT
It is commonly believed that women are nowhere mentioned in the American Constitution. Although the absence of women from the Constitution has seemed quite clear, scholars have not known what to make of this silence. It was Monday, June 11, and the delegates who had convened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation were now into their second week of secret meetings. The issue before the convention was who should vote for each branch of the proposed federal legislature. In fact, if people follow the debate on this clause, they can see that throughout the deliberations the delegates assumed that women, as well as children, were to be included whenever the question came up of who should be counted for purposes of apportionment. To include female inhabitants when apportioning representatives, then, was a significant extension of democratic trends that were reshaping representation in the states.
