[3] During the American Civil War, Minor was an active member of the St. Louis Ladies' Union Aid Society that later became the Western Sanitary Commission.

"[5] Later that year, Francis and Virginia Minor drafted and circulated pamphlets arguing for women's suffrage based on the newly passed Fourteenth Amendment.

When election registrar Reese Happersett turned her down, Virginia (represented by Francis) filed suit in the Missouri state courts.

[5] The Supreme Court unanimously held "that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one", and that the decision of who should be entitled to vote was left to the legislative branch.

The trustee was to hold the property in trust only until such time as Virginia Minor determined to "sell, mortgage, devise, bequeath or otherwise dispose of the same or any part thereof at her will and pleasure".

Her bronze bust was unveiled in 2014 as one of forty-four on permanent display in the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City.

"Historians seem to find the idea that men might, at the expense of their gender privilege, take a stand for the emancipation of women, puzzling, if not inexplicable".

As we will see, it was the gender equality that the Minors practiced at home for more than twenty years as a married couple—not the inequality between them—that underwrote their eventual emergence as the leading advocates of women's suffrage in the state.

In 1867, she circulated a petition to the state legislature, requesting that a proposed amendment allowing African American men to vote be expanded to include women as well.