e any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Then in the controversial second section which provided the penalty of
reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes
of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by
the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define
legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single
word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise
arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere
abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to
women, there was no doubt.

With determination, Susan and Mrs. Stanton fought this injustice. Were
they not "persons born ... in the United States," they asked. Were
they forever to be regarded as children or as lower than persons,
along with criminals, idiots, and the insane? Were women not counted
in the basis of representation and should they not have a voice in the
election of those representatives whose office their numbers helped to
establish?

As Susan studied the Constitution, she saw that the question of
suffrage had up to this time been left to the states and that there
were no provisions defining suffrage or citizenship or limiting the
right of suffrage. Only now was the precedent being broken by the
Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship on Negroes and
limited suffrage to males. How could this be constitutional, she
reasoned, when the first lines of the Constitution read, "We, the
people of the United States, in order to ... establish justice ... and
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America." Of course "the people" must include women, if the English
language meant what it said.

The Fourteenth Amendment with the limiting word "male" was passed by
Congress and referred to the states for ratification in June 1866. As
never before, Susan felt the curse of the tradition of the
unimportance of women. Once more politicians and reformers had ignored
women's inherent rights as human beings. In spite of women's
intelligence and their wartime service to their country, no statesman
of power or vision felt it at all necessary to include women under the
Fourteenth Amendment's broad term of "persons." Yet accord