"If any State shall
disfranchise any of its _male_ citizens, all of that class shall
be counted out of the basis of representation." Male citizens!
For the first time in the history of our Government that
discriminating adjective was placed in the Constitution, and yet
the men on the floor of Congress, from Charles Sumner down, all
declared that this amendment would not in any wise change the
status of women!

We at once asserted our right to vote under this amendment: "All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to
the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and
of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of
citizens of the United States." Our first trial was on civil
rights, when Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago, who had been for some
time publishing a law journal which every lawyer in the State
said he could not afford to do without, applied for admission to
the bar, and these same lawyers denied it. She appealed to the
Illinois Supreme Court and it confirmed the denial, because she
was not only a woman but a married woman. Then she appealed her
case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a majority of
this court decided that the right to be a lawyer was not
especially a citizen's right and that therefore the State of
Illinois could legally abridge the privileges and immunities of
its women by denying them admission to the bar.

I shall never forget how our hearts sank when in 1871 that
decision came, declaring the powerlessness of the Federal
Constitution to protect women in their civil right of being
eligible to the legal profession. When we said if these rights
which it is meant to protect are not civil they must be political
rights, we thought we had the Supreme Court in a corner. But when
my trial for voting came on, Justice Hunt said that the right to
vote was a special right belonging to men alone. We didn't
believe that this decision could be confirmed, but it was, when
Mrs. Minor, who attempted to vote at the same election in her
State of Missouri, appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the
United States. It was argued by her husband, the ablest of
lawyers, and when the Judges brought in their decision