Cite as: 511 U. S. 127 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
the Equal Protection Clause, particularly where, as here, the discrimination serves to ratify and perpetuate invidious, archaic, and overbroad stereotypes about the relative abilities of men and women.
II
Discrimination on the basis of gender in the exercise of peremptory challenges is a relatively recent phenomenon. Gender-based peremptory strikes were hardly practicable during most of our country's existence, since, until the 20th century, women were completely excluded from jury service.2 So well entrenched was this exclusion of women that in 1880 this Court, while finding that the exclusion of African-American men from juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment, expressed no doubt that a State "may confine the selection [of jurors] to males." Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S., at 310; see also Fay v. New York, 332 U. S. 261, 289-290 (1947).
Many States continued to exclude women from jury service well into the present century, despite the fact that women attained suffrage upon ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.3 States that did permit women to serve on juries often erected other barriers, such as registration requirements and automatic exemptions, designed to deter women from exercising their right to jury service. See, e. g.,
2 There was one brief exception. Between 1870 and 1871, women were permitted to serve on juries in Wyoming Territory. They were no longer allowed on juries after a new chief justice who disfavored the practice was appointed in 1871. See Abrahamson, Justice and Juror, 20 Ga. L. Rev. 257, 263-264 (1986).
3 In 1947, women still had not been granted the right to serve on juries in 16 States. See Rudolph, Women on Juries—Voluntary or Compulsory?, 44 J. Am. Jud. Soc. 206 (1961). As late as 1961, three States, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, continued to exclude women from jury service. See Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961). Indeed, Alabama did not recognize women as a "cognizable group" for jury-service purposes until after the 1966 decision in White v. Crook, 251 F. Supp. 401 (MD Ala.) (three-judge court).
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