it was to
the effect that the Constitution of the United States has no
voters. Thus it is that we have two Supreme Court decisions
relative to the powers of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect
women, and in both cases they have been excluded absolutely from
its provisions.

I remember, Mrs. Minor (turning to that lady), how we discussed
these questions in those early years. We weren't sleepy in our
talk as we were being cut off inch by inch from the protection of
the Constitution. I remember how Mrs. Stanton said in a public
address: "If you continue to deny to women the protection of this
amendment, you will finally come to the point when it will cease
to protect even black men," and we have lived to see that day.

The address on The Coming Sex by Mrs. Eliza Archard Connor, a
well-known journalist of New York, was declared by the press to be in
its delivery "the gem of the convention." She said in part:

It is my conviction that women are the natural orators of the
race. They have keener sympathies and quicker intuitions than
men. They have a gift of language that not even their worst
enemies will deny, and these are just the qualities which go to
make the orator.... The time is coming when we shall need all our
eloquence, all our intellectual power and all our love. The day
is approaching when men will come with ballots in their hands,
begging women to use them....

Wherever you go, wake women up, tell them to learn everything.
Tell them to study with all their might history, civil
government, political economy, social and industrial science--for
the time is coming when they will need them all....

This is the work before us. This is the meaning of the desperate
unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us
here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged
order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire
and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have
wrought as best we might for the higher education of women, for
their pecuniary independence, for their civil and political
rights, fighting the world, the flesh and the devil.

My own work has been in the field of journalism. For nearly
twenty years I have faced here every form of disability because I
am a woman, have met defeat after