Gordon, who was from the southern state of Louisiana, supported women's suffrage, but opposed the idea of a federal suffrage amendment, charging that it would violate states' rights. She said that empowering federal authorities to enforce a constitutional right for women to vote in the South could lead to similar enforcement of the constitutional right of African Americans to vote there, a right that was being evaded, and, in her opinion, rightly so. Her committee was too small to seriously affect the NAWSA's direction, but her public condemnation of the proposed amendment, expressed in terms of vehement racism, deepened fissures within the organization.