By this time, Congress had passed a civil rights bill over President Johnson's veto, conferring the rights of citizenship upon freedmen, and a Fourteenth Amendment to make these rights permanent was now before Congress. The latest developments regarding the various drafts of the Fourteenth Amendment were passed along to Susan and Mrs. Stanton by Robert Dale Owen. Senator Sumner, he reported, had yielded to party pressure and now supported the Fourteenth Amendment, although in the past he had always maintained such an amendment wholly unnecessary since there was already enough justice, liberty, and equality in the Constitution to protect the humblest citizen. Senator Sumner opposed and defeated a clause in the amendment referring to "race" and "color," words which had never previously been mentioned in the Constitution, but he raised no serious objection to the introduction of the word "male" as a qualification for suffrage, which was also unprecedented. That he tried time and time again to avoid the word "male" when he was redrafting the amendment or that Thaddeus Stevens tried to substitute "legal voters" for "male citizens" was no comfort to Susan and Mrs. Stanton, as they saw the Fourteenth Amendment writing discrimination against women into the federal Constitution for the first time.[180] As they carefully read over the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which conferred citizenship on every person born or naturalized in the United States, women's rights seemed assured: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Then in the controversial second section which provided the penalty of reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to women, there was no doubt.