here shall be no more slaves," said our brethren. "We proclaim
universal suffrage. All shall have the right to elect the agents
who shall carry out the Constitution which should be based on the
principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Let each one
come and deposit his vote; the barrier of privilege is
overturned; before the electoral urn there are no more oppressed,
no more masters and slaves."

Woman, in listening to this appeal, rises and approaches the
liberating urn to exercise her right of suffrage as a member of
society. But the barrier of privilege rises also before her. "You
must wait," they say. But by this claim alone woman affirms the
right, not yet recognized, of the half of humanity--the right of
woman to liberty, equality, and fraternity. She obliges man to
verify the fatal attack which he makes on the integrity of his
principles.

Soon, in fact during the wonderful days of June, 1848, liberty
glides from her pedestal in the flood of the victims of the
reaction; based on the "right of the strongest," she falls,
overturned in the name of "the right of the strongest."

The Assembly kept silence in regard to the right of one-half of
humanity, for which only one of its members raised his voice, but
in vain. No mention was made of the right of woman in a
Constitution framed in the name of Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity.

It is in the name of these principles that woman comes to claim
her right to take part in the Legislative Assembly, and to help
to form the laws which must govern society, of which she is a
member.

She comes to demand of the electors the consecration of the
principle of equality by the election of a woman, and by this act
she obliges man to prove that the fundamental law which he has
formed in the sole name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, is
still based upon privilege, and soon privilege triumphs over this
phantom of universal suffrage, which, being but half of itself,
sinks on the 31st of May, 1850.

But while those selected by the half of the people--by men
alone--evoke force to stifle liberty, and forge restrictive laws
to establish order by compression, woman, guided by fraternity,
foreseeing incessant struggles, and in the hope of putting an end
to them, makes an appeal to