ABSTRACT
Despite the progress that has been made in the last century, gender equality and women’s rights are still an important challenge in the United States. The present chapter aims to analyse the contemporary panorama of women’s rights, focusing on the constitutional framework that has developed in the United States in order to eradicate discrimination on the basis of sex or gender. While the chapter argues that despite protective constitutional and legislative provisions the United States still faces issues in ensuring a coherent implementation of women’s rights, it also provides an historical analysis of the development of the US constitutional framework, starting with the abstract representation of man as a political subject and subsequently focusing on the battle to expand political subjectivity. In particular, the chapter presents the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which empowered women with political rights. It then analyses the 1923 amendment to guarantee equal rights for women, which failed ratification, arguing that the lack of an explicit amendment guaranteeing equal rights between men and women in the US Constitution has increased the Supreme Court’s role in the battle for the recognition of women’s equality, thus requiring an in-depth analysis of its leading decisions that contributed to a change in the matter of gender equality.
