# Talk:Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Re: "In addition, most Native Americans and Asian Americans throughout the US still had no constitutional right to vote due to citizenship restrictions, while Black women had no constitutional right to vote due to their gender." (removed here)
That paragraph & the paragraph following it are about ways in which people ostensibly covered by the 15th amendment were still disenfranchised. The article already discusses poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation as continued barriers; it should also mention racialized barriers that prevented Native Americans and Asian Americans from voting. In addition, as the article stands now, "poll taxes and literacy tests ...instituted across the South" are described as "effectively disenfranchising the great majority of blacks," without any mention of the fact that Black women in both the North and South (i.e., a majority) were disenfranchised by their gender. Although poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses did not only affect Black voters, they are relevant in this context because of the practical reality of what these restrictions meant for large numbers of Black citizens. Gender-based restrictions are also relevant for similar reasons. Siragitkey (talk) 03:26, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

An article's Introduction is a summary of what is in the body of the article. What you added to this article's Introduction does not refer to anything in the body of this article. That's why I reverted your edit. SMP0328. (talk) 04:33, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

The ratification section includes a few paragraphs on the relationship of the amendment to the women’s suffrage movement. There are a couple sentences in there whose relevance isn’t clear to me and feel like a bit of a non sequitur. Can the connection be clarified — or if there is none, perhaps these should be moved elsewhere? These bolded sentences:

One source of opposition to the proposed amendment was the women's suffrage movement, which before and during the Civil War had made common cause with the abolitionist movement. State constitutions often connected race and sex by limiting suffrage to "white male citizens".However, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had explicitly protected only male citizens in its second section, activists found the civil rights of women divorced from those of blacks. Matters came to a head with the proposal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred race discrimination but not sex discrimination in voter laws. One of Congress's most explicit discussions regarding the link between suffrage and officeholding occurred during discussions about the Fifteenth Amendment. Initially, both houses passed a version of the amendment that included language referring to officeholding but ultimately the language was omitted.

During this time, women continued to advocate for their own rights, holding conventions and passing resolutions demanding the right to vote and hold office. Some preliminary versions of the amendment even included women....
Zeligf (talk) 14:47, 6 April 2025 (UTC)