In the early days of the movement to enfranchise women, no other method was considered than that of altering the constitution of each individual State, as it was generally accepted that the right to prescribe the qualifications for the suffrage rested entirely with the States and that the National Constitution could not be invoked for this purpose. While the word "male" was not used in this document, yet with the one exception of New Jersey, where women exercised the full suffrage from the adoption of its first constitution in 1776 until 1807, there is no record of any woman's being permitted to vote. At the inception of the republic women were almost wholly uneducated; they were unknown in the industrial world; there were very few property owners among them; the manifold exactions of domestic duties absorbed all their time, strength and interest; and for these and many other causes they were not public factors in even the smallest sense of the word. One could readily believe that the founders of the Government never imagined a time when women would ask for a voice were it not for the significant fact that every State constitution, except the one mentioned above, was careful to put up an absolute barrier against such a contingency by confining the elective franchise strictly to "male" citizens--and there it has stood impassable down to the present day. It was almost the exact middle of the nineteenth century before the first demand was made by women for the right to represent themselves--the right for which their forefathers had fought a seven-years' war, and the one which had been made the corner-stone of the new Government. The complete story of the startling results which followed this demand never has been told but once, and that was when Vol. I of this History of Woman Suffrage was written. It was related then by the two who were the principal personages in a period which tried women's souls as they were never tried before--Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.[3] This movement for the freedom of women was scarcely launched when the long-threatened Civil War broke forth and precipitated the struggle for the liberty of another class whose slavery seemed far more terrible than the servitude of white women. The five years' ordeal which followed developed women as all the previous centuries had not been able to do, and when peace reigned once more, when an entire race had been born into freedom and the republic had been consecrated anew, the whole status of the American woman had been changed and the lines which circumscribed her old sphere had been forever obliterated. Women were studying laws, constitutions and public questions as never before in all history, and, as they saw millions of colored men endowed with the full prerogatives of citizenship, they began to ask, "Am I not also a citizen of this great republic and entitled to all its rights and privileges?"