Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 5.djvu/656

 or in any way abridged except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens 21 years of age in such State.

Up to this time there was no mention of suffrage in the Federal Constitution except the provision for electing members of the Lower House of Congress but now for the first time it actually discriminated against women by imposing a penalty on the States for preventing men from voting but leaving them entirely free to prohibit women. When even this penalty proved insufficient to protect negro men in their attempts to vote, Congress in 1869 submitted a 15th Amendment which was declared ratified the following year: "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 race, color or previous condition of servitude."

Those who had been striving for two decades to obtain suffrage for women protested by every means in their power against this second discrimination. They implored and demanded that the word "sex"? should be included in this amendment, which would have forever settled the question, just as the omission of the word "male" in the 14th Amendment would have settled it. The most of the men who had stood by them in their early struggles for the vote, when both were working together for the freedom of the slaves, now sacrificed them rather than imperil the political rights of the negro men. Some of the women themselves were persuaded to abandon their opposition to these amendments by the promise of the Republican leaders that as soon as they were safely intrenched in the constitution another should be placed there providing for woman suffrage. This promise they did not try to keep and it remained unfulfilled over fifty years. Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton were never for one moment deceived or silenced but in their paper, The Revolution, they opposed these amendments as long as they were pending.

Although the protests were in vain the women had learned that they might be relieved of the intolerable burden of having to obtain the suffrage State by State through permission of a