in rice fields five years; the recital of these facts roused Northern indignation and created a great political party to put down the bad thing. But our laws and customs to-day actually destroy more girls and women than slave codes murdered negroes then! How long must American girls be crucified, on the fiery cross of self-destruction, to save this people? Does not the heart of this contented wife yearn to help us right the wrongs? Her own dear girl, left penniless and an orphan, may have to enter the struggle for life alone; will she not arm her for the conflict? Will she not save her darling boy from the savage custom of presuming to rule the one being whom he should respect as an equal.
Besides, woman can afford to be indifferent to nothing which degrades women; the sad fact, that "the contentment of slaves renders objection to liberty possible," makes it a more imperative duty to bestir ourselves to see justice done. Living in a world of petty details engenders narrow habits of mind, and the bounding aspirations of youth are killed out in the dull round of restricted life. "It might have been" is written over the tomb of many buried hopes. To think slavery liberty and dependence an honor; to be satisfied "with what we have rather than with what we want," that is the calamity. Speculative thought has ranged from asserting the absolute non-existence of mind, save as a form or function of matter, to a belief in the merely phenomenal existence of matter dependent on a sentient immaterial entity, mind, which, wresting from philosophy a recognition of its distinct independent being here, now comes back from the other side of death to say it lives there also. So woman from the dead level of oriental materialism, quickened by Judean religion, Grecian thought, Roman justice, German insight and Saxon common sense, has risen to assert an original right to life. He who denies or ignores her claim must be something less than a man; while she who goes forth to proclaim it is backed by the finest impulses of civilization, and gives new evidence of an ever-living and redeeming spiritual presence. For one to argue his right to hold, and woman's reluctance to claim what he has taken by force, is a specimen of insolence the future will blush to think of. Preferring to bear the ills on hand, rather than fly to others they know not of, negroes often disclaimed a wish to be free; but, though they did not even petition for liberation or the ballot, they were freed and enfranchised nevertheless, partly for party supremacy, but chiefly because it is unjust to the citizen and hurtful to the State to deny their manhood. The Proclamation of Emancipation was the decree of fate rather than the act of a man, for Lincoln marched under "sealed orders" to that beneficent event. I have met many women who said they did not want to vote, but never one who did not change her mind, after intelligent and candid investigation of the subject. From the disturbing questions of street preacher Socrates to this hour, no reform of equal age ever marshalled under its banner more intelligence, culture, genius, wealth, or numbers that now demand and will win women's suffrage.
Bad husbandry.Our male objector who thinks it bad husbandry to harrow up wedded contentment with these exciting themes, that a strong-minded woman is an intellectual tower of Pisa, under the shadow of which it were unsafe to live, forgets that domestic, like political order rests on consent, not coercion. A large and increasing majority of applicants for divorce are women,[1] intelligent, sensitive natures decline proposals or accept them as a dreadful necessity to secure bread and a home; marriage is on the decline, partly for its being too expensive, but chiefly because it hinders free enterprise, and is repulsive to personal sanctity; from this one slave state emancipation did not reach there are more fugitives than ever fled from chattel bondage; men sound an alarm that the institution
- ↑ In Vermont, out of 581 divorces granted, 815 were applied for by women; in Massachusetts out of 1,294, 866; in Connecticut out of 810, 540; two-thirds of the libellants, were women. In the list of divorces granted during five years published by order of the legislature of Massachusetts by the side of one hundred and nineteen divorces, or separations granted for cruelty of the husband, there appear three for cruelty of the wife.—Woolsey's Divorce and Divorce Legislation, pp. 203, 231.
