--from Nook Farm, by Joseph Van Why

"I only wish to fasten upon your minds now this thought that women are included in this word "people" of the preamble, and were intended to be included as much as men, and that their non-use of the ballot in all the past has not cut them off from their right to use the ballot at any time they may see fit; and you will perceive by a careful examination of the whole constitution that women were embraced in its provisions precisely as men were ...." Isabella Beecher Hooker

In December of 1870, Isabella Beecher Hooker organized a women's convention with money borrowed from her husband, John Hooker. The convention's aim was to address Congress and demand a 16th amendment to the Constitution, allowing women to vote. By the spring of 1870, women reformers had split, and two separate organizations formed. The split began to form when Elizabeth Cady Stanton introduced a resolution at the tenth National Woman's Rights Convention, stipulating that in some cases divorce was justified. Stanton said that the marriage license was a civil contract and should be nullified if both parties didn't live up to it. To a group of middle-class New England women, this notion of "free love" was scandalous. They broke away from the National Woman's Suffrage Association to form the American Woman's Suffrage Association and elected Henry Ward Beecher president. The National Woman's Suffrage Association elected Beecher's younger and more-liberal colleague Theodore Tilton as its president.

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