t, and if she wait for him to
ask her, she will never vote.... Either man must be made to see and
feel ... the need of woman's help in the great field of human
government, and so demand it; or woman must arise and come forward as
she never has, and take her place."[311]

The case of Virginia Minor of St. Louis still held out a glimmer of
hope. She had brought suit against an election inspector for his
refusal to register her as a voter in the presidential election of
1872, and the case of Minor vs. Happersett reached the United States
Supreme Court in 1874. An adverse decision, on March 29, 1875,
delivered by Chief Justice Waite, a friend of woman suffrage, was a
bitter blow to Susan and to all those who had pinned their faith on a
more liberal interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments.

Carefully studying the decision, Susan tried to fathom its reasoning,
so foreign to her own ideas of justice. "Sex," she read, "has never
been made of one of the elements of citizenship in the United
States.... The XIV Amendment did not affect the citizenship of women
any more than it did of men.... The direct question is, therefore,
presented whether all citizens are necessarily voters."[312]

She read on: "The Constitution does not define the privileges and
immunities of citizens.... In this case we need not determine what
they are, but only whether suffrage is necessarily one of them. It
certainly is nowhere made so in express terms....

"When the Constitution of the United States was adopted, all the
several States, with the exception of Rhode Island, had Constitutions
of their own.... We find in no State were all citizens permitted to
vote.... Women were excluded from suffrage in nearly all the States by
the express provision of their constitutions and laws ... No new State
has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of
suffrage upon women, and this has never been considered valid
objection to her admission. On the contrary ... the right of suffrage
was withdrawn from women as early as 1807 in the State of New Jersey,
without any attempt to obtain the interference of the United States to
prevent it. Since then the governments of the insurgent States have
been reorganized under a requirement that, before their
Representatives could be admitted to seats in Congress, they must have
adopted new Constitutions, republican in form. In no one of these
Constitutions was suffrage conferred upon wome