Women were first allowed to serve on juries in the United States in 1870, when Wyoming Territory seated the first female jurors, but statewide rights came gradually: Utah passed the first state statute authorizing women jurors in 1898, Mississippi did not lift its ban until 1968, and the U.S. Supreme Court did not rule the systematic exclusion of women from juries unconstitutional until Taylor v. Louisiana in 1975.
The First Women Jurors
Wyoming Territory holds the distinction of seating the world’s first female jurors in March 1870, shortly after the territorial legislature passed its suffrage act in 1869. Women served on both grand juries and trial juries in Laramie and later in Cheyenne through 1871. The experiment was short-lived. When the judge who had empaneled them left the bench in October 1871, his replacement excluded women, and the practice stopped. Wyoming did not restore women’s jury eligibility until 1949.1WyoHistory.org. Women on the Jury: Wyoming Makes History Again
Permanent change began with Utah, which in 1898 became the first state to formally authorize women jurors by statute, roughly three years after women gained the vote there. Washington removed its ban in 1911, Kansas in 1912. In several early-adopter states, the path to the jury box ran through the ballot box: once women could vote, laws tying jury eligibility to voter rolls automatically made them eligible to serve.
Progress was uneven. By the late 1920s, only about nineteen states allowed women on juries. The rest either barred women outright or granted blanket exemptions with the same practical effect.
What the 19th Amendment Did and Didn’t Do
Suffragists expected that the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, would carry jury rights along with the vote. In states where jury eligibility was already tied to voter rolls, the logic seemed simple.2Hamilton County Law Library. A Jury of 12 Men: Jury Duty in the Wake of the 19th Amendment
The result was a patchwork. Massachusetts concluded that voting rights carried jury rights with them. New York and New Jersey took the opposite view, holding that the 19th Amendment did not disturb the common-law restriction and that separate legislation was required. Women in some states started receiving jury summonses almost immediately after 1920. Women in others waited decades.
Federal Juries Took a Separate Path
Before 1957, federal courts generally drew jurors using state qualifications. If a state barred women from state juries, federal courts in that state excluded them too.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 established uniform federal juror qualifications independent of state law, making women eligible for federal jury service nationwide. Congress went further with the Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, which required that juries in federal district courts be “selected at random from a fair cross section of the community” and prohibited excluding any citizen from federal jury service on account of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or economic status.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 U.S. Code 1862 – Discrimination Prohibited
The Last Holdout States
Three states kept outright statutory bans on women jurors well into the 1960s: Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Alabama and South Carolina removed their bans in the mid-1960s. Mississippi became the last state in the nation to allow women on juries, doing so in 1968.
Nearly seventy years separated Utah’s 1898 statute from Mississippi’s 1968 reform. During that stretch, the country ratified a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the vote, fought two world wars, and passed sweeping civil rights legislation. The right to sit in a jury box remained contested until the Supreme Court finally intervened.
Hoyt v. Florida and the Opt-In Problem
Removing outright bans did not end exclusion. Many states adopted “opt-in” systems that technically allowed women to serve but required them to personally register with the court clerk to volunteer. Men were included automatically.
In Hoyt v. Florida (1961), the Supreme Court upheld one of these systems. The Court reasoned that a state could conclude women “should be relieved from the civic duty of jury service” unless they personally decided it was consistent with their responsibilities at home. The predictable result in one Florida county: only ten women out of 100,000 people appeared on the jury list.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57 (1961)
Taylor v. Louisiana Settled the Constitutional Question
Fourteen years after Hoyt, the Court reversed course. In Taylor v. Louisiana (1975), a male defendant challenged his conviction on the grounds that no women appeared on his jury venire, even though women made up 53% of eligible citizens in the district. Louisiana, like Florida before it, required women to file a written declaration volunteering for jury service.5Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975)
The Court held that the Sixth Amendment guarantees every criminal defendant a jury drawn from a representative cross-section of the community, and that systematically excluding women violated that guarantee. The ruling ended all remaining opt-in systems and blanket sex-based exemptions. After Taylor, every state had to include women in the jury pool on the same terms as men.
The 1994 Loophole Closure
Taylor guaranteed women a place in the jury pool. It did not stop attorneys from striking individual women during jury selection. Lawyers on both sides of a case can use “peremptory challenges” to remove prospective jurors without giving a reason, and some attorneys used these strikes to eliminate women based on assumptions about how they would vote.
The Supreme Court closed that gap in J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B. (1994), holding that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids using peremptory challenges to remove jurors because of their gender. The Court declared that “gender, like race, is an unconstitutional proxy for juror competence and impartiality.” An attorney who appears to be striking jurors based on sex must now offer a gender-neutral explanation or lose the challenge.6Law.Cornell.Edu. J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B.
Timeline at a Glance
- 1870: Wyoming Territory seats the first female jurors in history; the practice ends in 1871.
- 1898: Utah becomes the first state to authorize women jurors by statute.
- 1911–1912: Washington and Kansas open jury service to women.
- 1920: The 19th Amendment grants women the vote but does not automatically extend jury eligibility.
- 1957: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 establishes uniform federal juror qualifications, making women eligible for federal juries nationwide.
- 1961: The Supreme Court upholds Florida’s opt-in system for women jurors in Hoyt v. Florida.
- 1968: Mississippi becomes the last state to remove its statutory ban on women jurors. Congress passes the Jury Selection and Service Act, prohibiting sex-based exclusion from federal juries.
- 1975: Taylor v. Louisiana rules that systematically excluding women from jury pools violates the Sixth Amendment.
- 1994: J.E.B. v. Alabama bars attorneys from using peremptory strikes to remove jurors based on gender.