Just as the curtain was closing on the struggle for the Seventeenth Amendment, the suffragist movement was starting to gain momentum on the same path of transformation. Like the former, the latter campaign began many decades before the constitutional amendment was achieved. It originated at a meeting on July 19-20, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. The participants drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments" protesting the political, social, and economic inferiority of women. The Declaration also included the first public demand for extending the franchise to women. It was the first of many such conventions in the nascent women's rights movement, and virtually all of the activists in the cause were abolitionists as well. 39 The Civil War and the subsequent amendments to the Constitution brought an extended hiatus to the woman suffrage movement, as national attention was focused on the abolition of slavery and the extension of political rights to African-Americans. Suffragists were unable to tie their cause to the racial issue and failed in an attempt to prevent the enfranchisement of African-Americans without the granting of the same rights to women. However, the passage of the Civil War Amendments did further the suffragist cause in one sense: it defined an objective for the movement that had previously seemed unattainable-an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.40
Accordingly, in January 1878, suffragists persuaded Senator A.A. Sargent of California to introduce a suffrage amendment in Congress. However, the movement was soon presented with seemingly insuperable barriers preventing congressional proposition. As with the popular election of Senators, an inherent structural interest in Congress made the proposal of a constitutional amendment virtually impossible under the existing institutional framework-sitting Congressmen were unwilling to risk their seats by trying their luck with an electorate that included women. The amendment was buried in committee for nine years, and when the full Senate finally considered it in 1887, it was defeated by a vote of sixteen to thirty-four. It would not come to a vote again in the Senate until 1914 and was not voted on at all in the House during this period.41 Faced with unyielding congressional inaction, suffragists turned to the states and embarked on the same path of incremental amendment used by proponents of the popular election of senators. All along, their primary objective would remain a federal constitutional amendment.42
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