delivered 17 June 1873 

Friends and Fellow Citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the  alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a  lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus  voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's  rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution,  beyond the power of any State to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution  says: 

"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,  establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,  promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our  posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." 

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male  citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to  give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the  half of our posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men. And it is a  downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty  while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this  democratic-republican government--the ballot. 

For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the  disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an  ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it  the blessings of liberty are for ever withheld from women and their female posterity.  To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the  governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever  established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the right govern  the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even  an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this  oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the  mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household--which ordains all  men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord and rebellion into  every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United  States, entitled to vote and hold office. The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe  any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Being persons,  then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any law, or to enforce  any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every  discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is  today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.