not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before
the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan
reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for
men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the
deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the
Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with
petitions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second
clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word
puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but
wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth
Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.[280]

"When the Fifteenth was presented without the word 'sex,'" she
continued, "we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends
declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and
again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war,
saying, 'After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your
case.'

"Have they done as they promised?" she asked. "When we come asking
protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men
say to us ... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in
the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void
the word 'male' in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word
'sex' in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon
yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the
end a bloody revolution...."

Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for
women, the Senate judiciary committee promptly issued an adverse
report, but Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent
supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the
House for a declaratory act for the Fourteenth Amendment and
Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the
right to vote and hold office in the territories.

* * * * *

Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for
woman suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in
Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of
the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she
realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run
do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality
who gave only part