Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.”
- Source
- On Women’s Right to Vote
- Date
- 1873
Meaning of “It was we, the people; not we, the…”
Anthony interprets the Constitution’s opening words as encompassing women and uses that reading to argue that citizenship and political rights cannot properly be restricted to men.
Where does it come from?
Speech commonly titled “On Women’s Right to Vote,” delivered after Anthony’s arrest for voting in the 1872 presidential election. The statement is constitutional advocacy from the nineteenth-century U.S. woman-suffrage movement, not current legal advice.