sociation, including Miss Anthony herself, felt convinced after the
decision against Mrs. Minor that it would be useless to expect from
the Supreme Court any interpretation of the Constitution which would
permit women to exercise the right of suffrage. They had learned,
however, through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, that it had been possible to amend this document in such a
way as to enfranchise an entire new class of voters--or in other words
to protect them in the exercise of a right which it seemed that in
some mysterious way they already possessed. As the Fourteenth
Amendment declared the negroes to be citizens, and the Fifteenth
forbade the United States or any State to deny or abridge "the right
of citizens of the United States to vote, on account of race, color or
previous condition of servitude," it was clearly evident that this
right inhered in citizenship. This being the case women must already
have it, but as there was no national authority prohibiting the States
from denying or abridging it, each of them did so by putting the word
"male" in its constitution as a qualification for suffrage; just as
many of them had used the word "white" until the adoption of the
Fifteenth Amendment by a three-fourths majority made this
unconstitutional. Therefore, since the _Minor vs. Happersett_
decision, the National Association has directed its principal efforts
to secure from Congress the submission to the several State
Legislatures of a Sixteenth Amendment which should prohibit
disfranchisement on account of "sex," as the Fifteenth had done on
account of "color."

The association does not discourage attempts in various States to
secure from their respective Legislatures the submission of an
amendment to the voters which shall strike out this word "male" from
their own constitutions. On the contrary, it assists every such
attempt with money, speakers and influence, but having seen such
amendments voted on sixteen times and adopted only twice (in Colorado
and Idaho), it is confirmed in the opinion that the quickest and
surest way to secure woman suffrage will be by an amendment to the
Federal Constitution. In other words it holds that women should be
permitted to carry their case to the selected men of the Legislatures
rather than to the masses of the voters.

From 1869 until the decision in the Minor case in 1875, the National
Association went before committees of every Congress with appeals fo