In this the third volume of the Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the story opens while woman suffragists await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in cases testing whether the Constitution recognized women as voters within the terms of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. At its close they are pursuing their own amendment to the Constitution and pressing the presidential candidates of 1880 to speak in its favor. Against the backdrop of an end to Reconstruction, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony set the goal of "National Protection for National Citizens"--a phrase defined by Anthony at the end of this volume as the "Supremacy of the United States government in the protection of citzens in their right to vote." Through their letters, speeches, articles, and diaries, the volume recounts the national careers of Stanton and Anthony as popular lecturers, their work with members of Congress to expand women's rights, their protests during the Centennial Year of 1876, and the launch that same year of their campaign for a sixteenth amendment. Among many speeches in the volume are Anthony's "Social Purity" and Stanton's "National Protection for National Citizens, " "The Bible and Woman Suffrage, " and "Our Girls."
