Walker’s position — that the existing Constitution already gave women the right to vote and that this right needed only to be asserted and exercised — was based on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of privileges and immunities to citizens of the United States. The argument was that voting was a privilege or immunity of citizenship, that women were citizens, and that therefore women had the constitutional right to vote without any additional amendment being necessary.
Susan B. Anthony had made essentially the same argument when she voted in 1872, was arrested for it, and was tried and convicted. The Supreme Court, in Minor v. Happersett in 1875, rejected the constitutional argument: voting was not a privilege of national citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court held, and states could limit the franchise to men without violating the Constitution. After that decision, the constitutional argument Walker was making had been definitively rejected by the highest court in the country.
Most suffragists, including Anthony and Stanton’s National Woman Suffrage Association, concluded after Minor v. Happersett that the constitutional argument had been exhausted and that a new constitutional amendment was the only viable route. Walker disagreed. She argued that the Supreme Court had been wrong, that the constitutional argument was still correct, and that pursuing an amendment was the wrong strategy.
This was not an unreasonable position in the abstract — Supreme Court decisions can be wrong, and the history of constitutional litigation is full of cases where earlier wrong decisions were eventually corrected. But it was a losing position in the practical politics of the suffrage movement. The major suffrage organizations did not have resources to spare on legal strategies that the Supreme Court had already rejected. Walker’s refusal to align with the amendment strategy made her increasingly marginal within the movement’s internal politics, even as she continued to do genuine work on behalf of the ultimate goal.