Sixteenth Amendment

The National Woman Suffrage Association was dedicated to opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, promoting a sixteenth amendment establishing female suffrage, supporting divorce reform, and advocating for other women’s rights issues.

On January 10, 1878, Senator Arlen A. Sargent of California proposed a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution.

The Sixteenth Amendment gives the federal government the power to enact a progressive income tax; the Seventeenth requires that the people, not legislators, choose United States senators.

No less important, the Sixteenth Amendment, adopted in 1913, established a national income tax; until then, as much as thirty per cent of federal revenue had come from excise taxes on alcohol.

In 1884, the House Judiciary Committee rejected the proposed Sixteenth Amendment on the ground that women inhabit and must remain confined to a secluded and private sphere: “To the husband, by natural allotment . . . fall the duties which protect and provide for the household, and to the wife the more quiet and secluded but no less exalted duties of mother to their children and mistress of the domicile.”