Many of the Republican leaders admitted that these amendments might be construed to include women, but were silenced by the cry of “party expediency.”  The fear of defeating the attempt to enfranchise the colored male citizen made them refuse to add the word “sex” to the Fifteenth Amendment, which would have placed this question beyond debate and put an end to the agitation that has continued for thirty years.  The women insisted that the exigency which compelled the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment by the various State legislatures was strong enough to carry it, even with the word “sex” included.  Having failed to gain this point, the National Association determined to maintain the position that women were already enfranchised, and embodied it in the call for the Washington convention of 1872:  “All those interested in woman’s enfranchisement are invited to consider the ’new departure’—­women already citizens, and their rights as such secured by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Federal Constitution.”

The same position was re-asserted in the resolutions adopted at that meeting, which declared that “while the Constitution of the United States leaves the qualifications of electors to the various States, it nowhere gives them the right to deprive any citizen of the elective franchise which is possessed by any other citizen; the right to regulate not including the right to prohibit the franchise;” that “those provisions of the several State constitutions which exclude women from the franchise on account of sex, are violative alike of the letter and spirit of the Federal Constitution;” and that “as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution have established the right of women to the elective franchise, we demand of the present Congress a declaratory act which shall secure us at once in the exercise of this right.”

Miss Anthony and other leaders officially asked the privilege of addressing the Senate and House upon this momentous question.  This was refused, as contrary to precedent, but a hearing was granted before the Senate Judiciary Committee,[63] Friday morning, January 12.  Not only the committee room but the corridors were crowded.  Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker spoke grandly,[64] and as usual Miss Anthony was chosen to clinch the argument, which she did as follows: 

You already have had logic and Constitution; I shall refer, therefore, to existing facts.  Prior to the war the plan of extending suffrage was by State action, and it was our boast that the National Constitution did not contain a word which could be construed into a barrier against woman’s right to vote.  But at the close of the war Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State.  When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed in Congress, we rushed to you with petitions praying you not to insert the word “male” in the