The constitutions of many states have provided for amendments by such difficult processes that they either have never been amended or have not been amended when the subject is in the least controversial.  Their provisions not infrequently are utilized by opponents of a cause to delay action for years.  A present case illustrates.  Newspapers in Kentucky which have opposed woman suffrage, and still do so, have started a campaign (December, 1916) to submit a woman suffrage amendment to voters with the announced intention of securing its defeat at the polls in order to remove it from politics for five years as the same question cannot be again submitted for that length of time.

There are state constitutions so impossible of amendment that women of those states can only secure enfranchisement through Federal action and fair play demands the submission of a Federal constitutional amendment. (See Chapter II.)

4.  Protection from inadequate election laws demands it.

The election laws of all states make inadequate provision for safeguarding the vote on constitutional amendments.  Since election laws do not protect suffrage referenda, suffragists justly demand the method prescribed by our national constitution to appeal their case from male voters at large to the higher court of Congress and the Legislatures. (See Chapters III and IV.)

5.  Equal status of men and women voters demands it.

Until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment the National Constitution did not discriminate against women but in Section 2 of that amendment provision was made whereby a penalty may be directed against any state which denies the right to vote to its male inhabitants possessed of the necessary qualifications as prescribed by nation and state.  If the entire 48 states should severally enfranchise women their political status would still be inferior to that of men, since no provision for national protection in their right to vote would exist.

The women of eleven states are said to vote on equal terms with men.  As a matter of fact they do not, since they not only lose their vote whenever they change their residence to any one of the 37 other states (except Illinois, where they lose only a portion of their privileges), but they enjoy no national protection in their right to vote.  Women justly demand “Equal Rights for All and Special Privileges for None.”  Amendment to the National Constitution alone can give them an equal status.  Equality of rights can never be secured through state by state enfranchisement.

6.  National significance of question demands it.

Woman suffrage in every other country is a National question.  With eleven American states and nearly half the territory of the civilized world already won; with the statement of the press still unchallenged that women voters were “the balance of power” which decided the last presidential election, the movement has reached a position of national significance in the United States.  Any policy which seeks to shift responsibility or to procrastinate action, is, to use the mildest phraseology, unworthy of the Congress in whose charge the making of American political history reposes.