The whole substrata of society is seething and foaming with pent-up endurance of injustice and wrong, and unless those abuses which have produced this condition are remedied at once, the existence of the Government cannot be counted upon.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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And it is criminal to seek to ignore this fact.
We must not “lie supinely upon our backs while the enemy binds us hand and foot,” and delivers us to destruction.
We must be perfect within ourselves before we can expect to become the pattern for others, or expect that others will gravitate to us.
I now take the final step, and show that the States themselves, by their legislative enactments, have removed the only obstacle which until then had prevented women from voting, and have forever debarred themselves from receding to their…
A right of a citizen is inherent in the individual, of which he cannot be deprived by any law of any State.
This distinction is made to show that to vote is not a privilege conferred by a State upon its citizens, but a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT of every citizen of the United States, of which they cannot be deprived.
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.
It is thus forever proclaimed, in unmistakable terms, that to vote is a right of citizens of the United States.
Were it an immunity, or even were it a privilege, to vote, those who possess it could not be deprived of it by any State, for the State is bound to protect every citizen within its jurisdiction in the exercise thereof.
Amendment again comes to our relief saying, “That no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins.