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HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE.
of everything relating to marriage, and the equally unnatural and mischievous passivity on the part of the other, have given birth to the meek maiden waiting for her fate, to the typical disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting, querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to matrimony, and the rush of women to the divorce courts for freedom from the galling bonds; all these and a thousand variations of each, until the nature of both sexes is so perverted that it is impossible to decide what is nature.
A letter was read from Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) urging women individually to petition Senators and Representatives for the removal of their political disabilities, because by this means these men were compelled to think on the question.
Mrs. Virginia L. Minor (Mo.) addressed the convention on The Law of Federal Suffrage, a legal argument on the right to vote conferred by the Constitution. Miss Anthony supplemented Mrs. Minor's argument with a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which she said:
When that Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion—when it was proposed to put the word "male" into the second section—it read: "If any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation." But there were timid souls on the floor of Congress at the close of the war, as well as at other periods of our history, and to prevent the enfranchisement of women by this amendment they moved to make it read: "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
