It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens, but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people–women as well as men.

This passage is associated with Susan B. Anthony’s constitutional argument for woman suffrage in the years immediately after the U.S. Civil War. In the late 1860s–early 1870s, Anthony and allies advanced the “New Departure” strategy: claiming that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee and the Constitution’s opening “We the People” already enfranchised women, so voting was a right women could assert rather than a privilege to be granted. Anthony used this reasoning in speeches and writings aimed at reframing the Constitution as gender-inclusive, countering prevailing interpretations that treated political rights as belonging only to male citizens.

Anthony reads the Constitution’s founding language as deliberately universal. By insisting that the Union was formed by “the whole people,” she challenges the customary narrowing of “the people” to white men and then to men generally. The contrast between “give” and “secure” underscores a rights-based view of liberty: rights are inherent and pre-exist government; government’s role is to protect them. The final clause—“women as well as men”—makes the argument explicit: excluding women from the franchise violates the Constitution’s stated purpose and the logic of popular sovereignty. The quote thus functions as both constitutional interpretation and moral indictment of gendered citizenship.