Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/298

264 The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

The congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.

Thus closed the forty-seventh congress, and although with so little promise of any substantial good for women, yet this slight recognition in legislation was encouraging to those who had so long appealed in vain for the attention of their representatives. A committee to even consider the wrongs of woman was more than had ever been secured before, and one to propose some measures of justice, sustained by the votes of a few statesmen awake to the degradation of disfranchisement, gave some faint hope of more generous action in the near future. The tone of the debates in these later years even, on the nature and rights of women, is wholly unworthy the present type of developed womanhood and the age in which we live.