e were
it not for the significant fact that every State constitution, except
the one mentioned above, was careful to put up an absolute barrier
against such a contingency by confining the elective franchise
strictly to "male" citizens--and there it has stood impassable down to
the present day.

It was almost the exact middle of the nineteenth century before the
first demand was made by women for the right to represent
themselves--the right for which their forefathers had fought a
seven-years' war, and the one which had been made the corner-stone of
the new Government. The complete story of the startling results which
followed this demand never has been told but once, and that was when
Vol. I of this History of Woman Suffrage was written. It was related
then by the two who were the principal personages in a period which
tried women's souls as they were never tried before--Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.[3]

This movement for the freedom of women was scarcely launched when the
long-threatened Civil War broke forth and precipitated the struggle
for the liberty of another class whose slavery seemed far more
terrible than the servitude of white women. The five years' ordeal
which followed developed women as all the previous centuries had not
been able to do, and when peace reigned once more, when an entire race
had been born into freedom and the republic had been consecrated anew,
the whole status of the American woman had been changed and the lines
which circumscribed her old sphere had been forever obliterated. Women
were studying laws, constitutions and public questions as never before
in all history, and, as they saw millions of colored men endowed with
the full prerogatives of citizenship, they began to ask, "Am I not
also a citizen of this great republic and entitled to all its rights
and privileges?"

Up to this time the word "male" never had appeared in the Federal
Constitution. In 1865, when the leaders among women were beginning to
gather up their scattered forces, and the Fourteenth Amendment was
under discussion, they saw to their amazement and indignation that it
was proposed to incorporate in that instrument this discriminating
word. Miss Anthony was the first to sound the alarm, and Mrs. Stanton
quickly came to her aid in the attempt to prevent this desecration of
the people's Bill of Rights. The thrilling account of their efforts to
thwart this highhanded act, their abandonment in consequence