second clause.  Our best friends on the floor of Congress said to us:  “The insertion of that word puts up no new barrier against woman; therefore do not embarrass us but wait until we get the negro question settled.”  So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word “male” was adopted.

Then, when the Fifteenth was presented without the word “sex,” we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of that word was no hindrance to us, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war.  “After we have enfranchised the negro we will take up your case.”  Have they done as they promised?  When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us that our only plan is to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word “male” in the Fourteenth, and supply the want of the word “sex” in the Fifteenth.  Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution.  It is only the close relations existing between the sexes which have prevented any such result from this injustice to women.

Gentlemen, I should be sure of your decision could you but realize the fact that we, who have been battling for our rights now more than twenty years, feel precisely as you would under such circumstances.  One of the most ardent lovers of freedom (Senator Sumner) said to me two winters ago, after our hearing before the committee of the District:  “I never realized before that you or any woman could feel the disgrace, the degradation of disfranchisement precisely as I should if my fellow-citizens had conspired to deprive me of my right to vote.”  Although I am a Quaker and take no oath, yet I have made a most solemn “affirmation” that I will never again beg my rights, but will come to Congress each year and demand the recognition of them under the guarantees of the National Constitution.

What we ask of the Republican party is simply to take down its own bars.  The facts in Wyoming show how it is that a Republican party can exist in that Territory.  Before women voted, there was never a Republican elected to office; after their enfranchisement, the first election sent one Republican to Congress and seven to the Territorial Legislature.  Thus the nucleus of a Republican party there was formed through the enfranchisement of women.  The Democrats, seeing this, are now determined to disfranchise them.  Can you Republicans so utterly stultify yourselves, can you so entirely work against yourselves, as to refuse us a declaratory law?  We pray you to report immediately, as Mrs. Hooker has said, “favorably, if you can; adversely, if you must.”  We can wait no longer.

The committee reported adversely on the question of woman’s right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.