Will any one pretend that these great enactments can be understood to mean less than the language thereof plainly conveys?
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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Or will any one claim that the old, absurd State laws, which were sunk in oblivion by the adoption of these amendments to the Constitution, are still in force?
Who will dare to say, in the face of these plainly worded amendments, which have such an unmistakable meaning, that the women of America shall not enjoy their emancipation as well as the black slave?
Therefore, your memorialist would most respectfully petition your Honorable Bodies to make such laws as in the wisdom of Congress shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the right vested by the Constitution in the…
The sovereign power of this country is perpetual in the politically-organized people of the United States, and can neither be relinquished nor abandoned by any portion of them.
The people in this Republic who confer sovereignty are its citizens: in a monarchy the people are the subjects of sovereignty.
All citizens of a republic by rightful act or implication confer sovereign power.
The subject of a monarch takes municipal immunities from the sovereign as a gracious favor; but the woman citizen of this country has the inalienable “sovereign” right of self-government in her own proper person.
Those who look upon woman’s status by the dim light of the common law, which unfolded itself under the feudal and military institutions that establish right upon physical power, cannot find any analogy in the status of the woman citizen of…
As sovereignty cannot be forfeited, relinquished or abandoned, those from whom it flows—the citizens—are equal in conferring the power, and should be equal in the enjoyment of its benefits and in the exercise of its rights and privileges.
One portion of citizens have no power to deprive another portion of rights and privileges such as are possessed and exercised by themselves.
Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins.