One step led to another; business opportunities increased; women accumulated property; Legislatures were compelled to revise the laws and the church was obliged to liberalize its interpretation of the Scriptures. Women began to organize; their missionary and charity societies prepared the way to clubs for self-improvement; these in turn broadened into civic organizations whose public work carried them to city councils and State Legislatures, where they found themselves in the midst of politics and wholly without influence. Thus they were led into the movement for the suffrage. It was only a few of the clear thinkers, the far seeing, who realized at the beginning that the principal cause of women's inferior position and helplessness lay in their disfranchisement and until they could be made to see it they were a dead weight on the movement. Men fully understood the power that the vote would place in the hands of women, with a lessening of their own, and in the mass they did not intend to concede it. The pioneers in the movement for the rights of women, of which the suffrage was only one, contested every inch of ground and little by little the old prejudice weakened, public sentiment was educated, barriers were broken down and women pressed forward. At the opening of the present century, while they had not obtained entire equality of rights, their status had been completely transformed in most respects and they were prepared to get what was lacking. None of these gains, however, had required the permission of the masses of men but only of selected groups, boards of trustees, committees, legislators. It was when women found that with all their rights they were at tremendous disadvantage without political influence and asked for the suffrage that they learned the difficulty of changing constitutions. They found that either National or State constitutions had to be amended and in the latter case the consent of a majority of all men was necessary. In Volume VI the attempt to obtain the vote through State action is described in 48 chapters and their reading is recommended to those who insisted that this was the way women should be enfranchised. Fifty-six strenuous campaigns were conducted, with their heavy demands on time, strength and money, and as a result 13 States gave suffrage to women! Wyoming and Utah entered the Union with it in their constitutions. Compare this result with the proclamation of the adoption of a Federal Amendment, which in a moment and a sentence conferred the complete franchise on the women of all the other States.