of the State
prevails. This amendment was inserted from considerations which
pertain to no other part of the question of suffrage. The negro
race had been recently emancipated; it was supposed that the
antagonism between them and their old masters and the prejudice
of race would be such as to obstruct the equal enjoyment of the
rights of freedom conferred by the national forces, and would
prevent the white race of the South from admitting the negro
race, however deserving it might be, to equal political
privileges. And, moreover, it was deemed by the North a point of
honor that, having conferred freedom on the negro, he should be
provided with the right of suffrage.

None of these considerations applies in the present case. It is
not pretended that any such antagonism or prejudice exists
between the sexes. It is not pretended that women have been
redeemed from an intolerable slavery by the power of the
government. It is not pretended that the sex in whose hands is
the political power of the States is unwilling, from any cause,
to do full justice to the other; for it is conceded that if the
proposed amendment should be adopted, its incorporation into the
constitution must result from the voluntary action of that sex in
which is vested this political power. No good reason has been
given why the congress of the United States should force or even
hasten the States into such action, and no such reason can be
given without a reversal of the theories on which our free
institutions are based.

The history given by the majority, of the legislation of the
several States in relation to the rights of persons and property
of married women showing as it does a steady advance in the
abolition of their common-law disabilities, conclusively
demonstrates that this question may be safely left for solution
where it now is and has always hitherto belonged. The public mind
is now being agitated in many of the States as to the rights of
women, not only as to suffrage, but as to their engaging in the
various employments from which they have hitherto been excluded.
This exclusion from certain employments has not been the result
of municipal but of social laws--the strongest of all human
regulations. As these social laws have been modified, so the
sphere