In this comprehensive and engaging book, Holly McCammon explores the activism behind the laws that eventually, although sometimes begrudgingly, granted women in the United States the right to serve on juries. Although the general timeline of women's inclusion on juries and the key judicial decisions that slowed or hastened the process have been well documented and analyzed, McCammon takes on the more difficult question of how women's jury activists “were able to win reforms in state-level jury laws.” (3) Her well-argued thesis is that “[j]ury rights for women were ultimately won because of the strategic activism of mobilized women,” (5) and that the key difference between states that were “swift” or “slow” in their adoption of inclusive jury laws was the willingness or ability of the local activists to strategically adapt their methods in the face of losses or indifference. She documents how movement actions and tactics can “lead to political success,” (11) and argues that the “[t]actics are likeliest to help activists achieve their goals when they are a well-tailored strategic response to the particular political and cultural context.” (17)

Women in this country were slow to gain access to the jury box. Although many people today dread jury service and will go to some lengths to avoid it, the right not to be excluded was hard fought. Early on, the Supreme Court ruled that the exclusion of blacks from jury pools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the exclusion marked a “brand upon them . . . an assertion of their inferiority.” (Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 308 (1879)). Although women had suffered similar types of formal exclusion from public and political life, the Court made clear that states could continue to insist that juries be made up solely of men. And whereas it was widely believed that the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in 1920, implicitly made women eligible for jury service, one did not inexorably follow from the other, even when the jury statutes used phrases such as “all electors.” Not until 1975, in Taylor v. Louisiana, did the Court find a constitutional problem with the exclusion of women from the jury pool. (Later cases extended the rights of both blacks and women to get from the jury pool to the jury box by holding that peremptory challenges could not be used on the basis of race or sex.) The state laws that voluntarily granted women the right to serve, enacted between 1870 (Wyoming) and 1968 (Mississippi) despite the lack of a constitutional mandate, were, therefore, even more important.

McCammon begins her exploration with a chapter on theory and method, in which she defines “strategic adaptation;” identifies the conditions that lead to, and result from, its use; and argues that “movement groups engaged in strategic adaptation are more likely to gain the political reforms they seek and to do so more rapidly than movement groups not practicing strategic adaptation.” (33) She then provides a comprehensive history of women's jury service, including both legislative and judicial developments over a century. The remaining chapters—the centerpiece of the book—are devoted to in-depth analyses of the women's jury service movement in fifteen states, in which she documents how and under what conditions strategic adaptation unfolded. She first compares and contrasts four states based on the whether they changed tactics in response to early losses; California activists worked to put more women in the legislature after the defeat of a jury bill and conducted an educational campaign to make its claim that women wanted to serve on juries more defensible. Activists in other states stayed the course, or even “grew frustrated and . . . withdrew.” (55) The second grouping revolves around the axis of countering public opposition and indifference. In New York, activists responded to concerns about women's fitness for jury service by bringing to light actual cases in England and the United States in which women served “to demonstrate that their opponents’ fears were unfounded.” (84) The third grouping focuses on the different degrees to which activists deployed strategic framing “to respond to cues from the broader context” and to “take advantage of signals and opportunities in the political field.” The success of Vermont activists, for example, in framing the question as a matter of fair verdicts rather than just women's rights contributed to their achieving jury rights in relatively short order. Women's voice on juries, advocates promised, “would mean fairer and more just legal verdicts.” (123) Finally, McCammon considers the turning points in various states, when their movements finally became more strategic and then achieved their goals.

A More Just Verdict is not a quick read, but it is worth the effort. McCammon provides an impressive level of detail, from archival sources that have been largely untapped by other researchers, about this highly important facet of women's citizenship. With compelling prose and ample support, she answers a previously unasked, but important, question: how did women gain the right to serve on juries in the United States?