ood suffrage
would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell
Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the
timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better
qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of
their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of
unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they
argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a
limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the
basis of sex.

Among Republican members of Congress and abolitionists, there was
serious discussion of a Fourteenth Amendment to extend to the Negro
civil rights and the ballot. Susan, reading about this in Kansas, and
Mrs. Stanton, discussing it in New York with her husband, Wendell
Phillips, and Robert Dale Owen, saw in such a revision of the
Constitution a just and logical opportunity to extend woman's rights
at the same time. Previously committed to state action on woman
suffrage but only because it had then seemed the necessary first step,
both women welcomed the more direct road offered by an amendment to
the Constitution. Only they of all the old woman's rights workers were
awake to this opportunity.

Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the
Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was
ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution
in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union
with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were
being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's
opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This
clearly was woman's hour.

* * * * *

"Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and
more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of
the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued
constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and
all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in
deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights
convention...."[173]

Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights
convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read
the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to
be comfortably loca