In January 1871, Victoria Woodhull became the first women to appear before a congressional committee when she addressed the House Judiciary Committee in a bid to persuade Congress to enact female suffrage. Benjamin Butler—a high-ranking Massachusetts Republican who would later chair the panel—allowed her to deliver her plea in person. Woodhull based her arguments on her belief that women already had the right to vote, in that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution implicitly granted that right to all citizens. The congressional majority did not accept her arguments and voted to dismiss the request, but the minority report written by just two of the committee’s members, Butler and William Loughridge, supported the cause, saying that women were “competent voters.” Woodhull went on to deliver fiery lectures on the constitutional enfranchisement of women, notably at Lincoln Hall in Washington, D.C., in February 1871. This expansion of her argument was published that same year in pamphlet form as Lecture on Constitutional Equality.