The ratification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments paved the way for a great deal of conflict. Before these amendments were passed, slavery was legal, and slaves had absolutely no rights, while women’s rights were very limited. This paved the way for the Civil War, in which both black women, white women, and slaves began a fight for equality, which resulted in two amendments being passed. The fourteenth amendment states that the right to vote cannot be taken away from any male citizen of the United States. They granted rights to all black and white men, but women were not mentioned at all.The amendments did not fulfill the main goal that was stated in the Declaration of Sentiments; “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all …show more content…
It can be argued that black men were not more deserving of rights than women, and that black men gaining rights before women was disregarding women and their suffering as a whole. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made this claim in a letter to The Revolution (June 18, 1868), when they wrote, “But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of the woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.” Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that rights should be given to those who are of a higher moral status, that women deserved them more because of their intelligence. They also wrote, “How insulting to put every shade and type of manhood above our heads, to make laws for educated refined, wealthy women.” This is a very strong depiction of what Anthony and Stanton were arguing. They wanted to make it clear that in no way were men as a …show more content…
Frederick Douglass made this argument when he said, “With us, the matter is a question of life and death. It is a matter of existence, at least in fifteen states of the Union. When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans..... then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Douglas makes the claim that slaves suffered so much more than women, which is a reason to grant rights to slaves first. While he does make a strong point here, Douglass mentions nothing about black women, and how they too were still treated as if they weren’t real members of society. He is proving Sojourner Truth’s point by strengthening the idea that men’s needs and the discrimination they went through is more neccessary to focus on than womens. He failed to address the fact that men were put at a higher stance than women, even though black woman had suffered just as much as black men. J. Elizabeth Jones also argued for the justification of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments. She wrote that there is no point in fighting more strongly for women’s rights than for abolitionism. She wrote, “Some of them are educated, wealthy, living continually the lives of noble men, shall we say to them stand back, turn again into the