With determination, Susan and Mrs. Stanton fought this injustice. Were they not "persons born ... in the United States," they asked. Were they forever to be regarded as children or as lower than persons, along with criminals, idiots, and the insane? Were women not counted in the basis of representation and should they not have a voice in the election of those representatives whose office their numbers helped to establish? As Susan studied the Constitution, she saw that the question of suffrage had up to this time been left to the states and that there were no provisions defining suffrage or citizenship or limiting the right of suffrage. Only now was the precedent being broken by the Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship on Negroes and limited suffrage to males. How could this be constitutional, she reasoned, when the first lines of the Constitution read, "We, the people of the United States, in order to ... establish justice ... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Of course "the people" must include women, if the English language meant what it said. The Fourteenth Amendment with the limiting word "male" was passed by Congress and referred to the states for ratification in June 1866. As never before, Susan felt the curse of the tradition of the unimportance of women. Once more politicians and reformers had ignored women's inherent rights as human beings. In spite of women's intelligence and their wartime service to their country, no statesman of power or vision felt it at all necessary to include women under the Fourteenth Amendment's broad term of "persons." Yet according to statements made in later years by John A. Bingham and Roscoe Conkling, both sponsors of the amendment and concerned with its drafting, the possibility was considered of protecting corporations and the property of individuals from the interference of state and municipal legislation, through the federal control extended by this amendment. At any rate, they wrought well for the corporations which have received abundant protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, along with all male citizens, while women were left outside the pale.[181]