the Fourteenth
Amendment. You remember the first clause, "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 and immunities of citizens." That was magnificent. Every
woman of us saw that it included the women of the nation as well as
black men. The second section, as Thaddeus Stevens drew it, said, "If
any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color,
all that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation;" but
at once the enemy asked, "Do you mean that if any State shall
disfranchise its negro women, you are going to count all of the black
race out of the basis of representation?" And weak-kneed Republicans,
after having fought such a glorious battle, surrendered; they could not
stand the taunt. Charles Sumner said he wrote over nineteen pages of
foolscap in order to keep the word "male" out of the Constitution; but
he could not do it so he with the rest subscribed to the amendment: "If
any State shall disfranchise any of its MALE citizens all of that class
shall be counted out of the basis of representation."

There was the first great surrender and, in all those years of
reconstruction, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great leader of our woman
suffrage movement, declared that because the Republicans were willing to
sacrifice the enfranchisement of the women of the nation they would lose
eventually the power to protect the black man in his right to vote. But
the leaders of the Republican party shouted back to us, "Keep silence,
this is the negro's hour." Even our glorious Wendell Phillips, who said,
"To talk to a black man of freedom without the ballot is mockery,"
joined in the cry, "This is the negro's hour;" but we never yielded the
point that, "To talk to women of freedom without the ballot is mockery
also." But timidity, cowardice and want of principle carried forward the
reconstruction of the government with the women left out.

Then came in 1867 the submission by your Kansas legislature of three
amendments to your constitution: That all men who had served in the
rebel army should be disfranchised; that all black men should be
enfranchised; and that all women should be enfranchised. The Democrats
held their State convention and resolved they would have nothing to do
with that "modern fanaticism o