ks to
watch and try young girls for the crime of infanticide, to decide
the moral code by which the mothers of this Republic shall be
governed? This manhood suffrage is an appalling question, and it
would be well for thinking women, who seem to consider it so
magnanimous to hold their own claims in abeyance until all men
are crowned with citizenship, to remember that the most ignorant
men are ever the most hostile to the equality of women, as they
have known them only in slavery and degradation.

Go to our courts of justice, our jails and prisons; go into the
world of work; into the trades and professions; into the temples
of science and learning, and see what is meted out everywhere to
women--to those who have no advocates in our courts, no
representatives in the councils of the nation. Shall we prolong
and perpetuate such injustice, and by increasing this power risk
worse oppressions for ourselves and daughters? It is an open,
deliberate insult to American womanhood to be cast down under the
iron-heeled peasantry of the Old World and the slaves of the New,
as we shall be in the practical working of the Fifteenth
Amendment, and the only atonement the Republican party can make
is now to complete its work, by enfranchising the women of the
nation. I have not forgotten their action four years ago, when
Article XIV., Sec. 2, was amended[113] by invidiously introducing
the word "male" into the Federal Constitution, where it had never
been before, thus counting out of the basis of representation all
men not permitted to vote, thereby making it the interest of
every State to enfranchise its male citizens, and virtually
declaring it no crime to disfranchise its women. As political
sagacity moved our rulers thus to guard the interests of the
negro for party purposes, common justice might have compelled
them to show like respect for their own mothers, by counting
woman too out of the basis of representation, that she might no
longer swell the numbers to legislate adversely to her interests.
And this desecration of the last will and testament of the
fathers, this retrogressive legislation for woman, was in the
face of the earnest protests of thousands of the best educated,
most refined and cultivated women of the North.

Now, when the attention o