econd section of the proposed
Fourteenth Amendment; and again we appealed to you by thousands of
petitions that you would add "sex" after "race or color" in the
Fifteenth, but all to no avail. Then by an eighty-thousand petition
in 1871 we demanded the enactment of a declaratory law that women
had the right to vote under the first section of the Fourteenth
Amendment. This, too, was denied us, not only by Congress but by
the Supreme Court, which held that the framers of the amendment had
only "colored men" in their thought, therefore none others could
come within its purview. From 1876 to the present we have from year
to year poured into Congress hundreds of thousands of petitions
asking you to take the initiative step for another amendment which
shall specifically prohibit the disfranchisement of women.

But, you say, why do you not go to your several States to secure
this right? I answer, because we have neither the women nor the
money to make the canvasses of the thirty-eight States, school
district by school district, to educate each individual man out of
the old belief that woman was created to be his subject. Four State
legislatures submitted the question of striking "male" from their
constitutions--Kansas, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska--and we made
the best canvass of each which was possible for a disfranchised
class outside of all political help. Negro suffrage was again and
again overwhelmingly voted down in various States; and you know,
gentlemen, that if the negro had never had the ballot until the
majority of white men, particularly the foreign born, had voted
"yes," he would have gone without it until the crack of doom. It
was because of this prejudice of the unthinking majority that
Congress submitted the question of the negro's enfranchisement to
the legislatures of the several States, to be adjudicated by the
educated, broadened representatives of the people. We now appeal to
you to lift the decision of _our_ question from the vote of the
populace to that of the legislatures, that thereby you may be as
considerate and just to the women of this nation as you were to the
freedmen.

Every new privilege granted to woman has been by the legislatures.
The liberal laws for married women, the right of the wife to own
and control her