Mrs. Virginia L. Minor (Mo.) addressed the convention on The Law of Federal Suffrage, a legal argument on the right to vote conferred by the Constitution. Miss Anthony supplemented Mrs. Minor's argument with a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which she said: When that Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion--when it was proposed to put the word "male" into the second section--it read: "If any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account of color, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation." But there were timid souls on the floor of Congress at the close of the war, as well as at other periods of our history, and to prevent the enfranchisement of women by this amendment they moved to make it read: "If any State shall disfranchise any of its _male_ citizens, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of representation." Male citizens! For the first time in the history of our Government that discriminating adjective was placed in the Constitution, and yet the men on the floor of Congress, from Charles Sumner down, all declared that this amendment would not in any wise change the status of women! We at once asserted our right to vote under this amendment: "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." Our first trial was on civil rights, when Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago, who had been for some time publishing a law journal which every lawyer in the State said he could not afford to do without, applied for admission to the bar, and these same lawyers denied it. She appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court and it confirmed the denial, because she was not only a woman but a married woman. Then she appealed her case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and a majority of this court decided that the right to be a lawyer was not especially a citizen's right and that therefore the State of Illinois could legally abridge the privileges and immunities of its women by denying them admission to the bar.