that in republics also political freedom was
withheld from women.

This was strikingly impressed upon the women of the United States in 1870.
At that time the negroes, who had been emancipated in 1863, were given
political rights throughout the Union by the addition of the Fifteenth
Amendment to the Federal Constitution.[5] In this way all power of the
individual states to abridge the political rights of the negro was taken
away.

The American women felt very keenly that in the eyes of their legislators
a member of an inferior race, _if only a man_, should be ranked superior
to any woman, be she ever so highly educated; and they expressed their
indignation in a picture portraying the American woman and her political
associates. This represented the Indian, the idiot, the lunatic, the
criminal,--_and woman_. In the United States they are all without
political rights.

Since 1848 an energetic suffrage movement has been carried on by the
American women. To-day there is a "Woman's Suffrage Society" in every
state, and all these organizations belong to a national woman's suffrage
league. In recent years there has arisen a vigorous woman's suffrage
movement within the numerous and influential woman's clubs (with almost a
million members) and among college women the College Equal Suffrage
League, the movement extending even into the secondary schools. The
National Trades Union League, the American Federation of Labor, and
nineteen state Federations of Labor have declared themselves in favor of
woman's suffrage. The leaders of the movement have now established the
fact that "the Constitution of the United States does not contain a word
or a line, which, if interpreted in the spirit of the 'Declaration of
Independence,' denies woman the right to vote in state and national
elections."

The preamble to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
"We, the people of the United States ... do ordain and establish this
Constitution for the United States of America." Women are doubtlessly
people. All the articles of the Constitution repeat this expression. The
objects of the Constitution are:

1. The establishment of a more perfect union of the states among
themselves,
2. The establishment of justice,
3. The insurance of domestic tranquillity,
4. The provision of common defense,
5. The promotion of the general welfare,
6. The securing of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our
posterity.