WOMAN AND THE FORUM. By Martha Strickland. "For woman is not undeveloped man, But diverse : could we make her as the man, Sweet love were slain : his dearest bond is this, — Not like to like, but like in difference." IN discussing the subject of woman and
- the forum it is not my purpose to treat
of women as lawyers or of the legal profes sion as an occupation for women, but rather to consider the broad subject of woman in all her relations to courts of justice. It is fast coming to be recognized that government exists for all citizens, regardless of accidental differences of physical or men tal organization, and that in its different departments all should find the same con sideration. In theory, at present all do; but in reality, even in our Republic, of which we are so justly proud, there are many classes of persons who are either wholly or partially overlooked, and whose interests, privileges, and rights are at the disposal of those who, from the very con stitution of their beings, do not and cannot give full meed of justice. Especially is this true of women in the judicial department. In that very branch of government whose fundamental principle is that all men shall be tried by their peers, women, save in the most limited degree, are called upon every day to submit their dearest rights of happi ness, property, and life to the judgment of persons differently constituted, mentally and physically, from themselves, and so widely separated by instincts, habit, thought, polit ical and social environment, that the maxim of Charles Reade's hero, " Put yourself in his place," is impossible, and any attempt thereto must from its inception prove a failure. The differences between man's nature and woman's nature are a bar, eternal as are Na ture's laws, to the equitable administration
of justice for humanity by men alone. Men cannot know all the subtile springs of feel ing and action hidden within woman's com plex organization. They cannot measure her needs by their own; nor mark for her the path which her own nature and her na ture's God traces through the wilderness of human thought and action. And yet from the paved market-place in ancient Rome, where sat the magistrates for the transaction of their business, to the wider forum of civilized America, woman's legal rights have been brought to the bar of masculine knowledge and manly chivalry. The result is that women have suffered, and through women all humanity have suffered. For broad as is man's outlook upon the world of knowledge, and deep as are the well-springs of his love and tenderness for woman, that complete appreciation of needs and innate sympathy with wants which members of one sex alone can have for one another, and which is the golden heart of justice, has been wanting to his adjudications. It is sometimes claimed that men are bet ter friends to women than women are to one another. All womanly, worldly experience de nies this. Men are, it is true, devoted lov ers; but when it comes to a matter of simple, true, appreciative friendship, that of women for women cannot be surpassed, and is only equalled by that of men for men. There is an innate knowledge that comes from sameness of organization, which seizes upon the difficulties of life and solves the problem for weal or woe without delay or difficulty. This innate knowledge women have of wo men, and men of men; but the distinct indi
