s rights movement commenced, by the laws of the
State of New York, and all the States, the father had the sole
custody and control of the children. No matter if he were a
brutal, drunken libertine, he had the legal right, without the
mother's consent, to apprentice her sons to rumsellers, or her
daughters to brothel keepers. He could even will away an unborn
child, to some other person than the mother. And in many of the
States the law still prevails, and legal mothers are still
utterly powerless under the common law.

I doubt if there is, to-day, a State in this Union where a
married woman can sue or be sued for slander of character, and
until quite recently there was not one in which she could sue or
be sued for injury of person. However damaging to the wife's
reputation any slander may be, she is wholly powerless to
institute legal proceedings against her accuser, unless her
husband shall join with her; and how often have we heard of the
husband conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good
name of his wife. A married woman can not testify in the courts
in cases of joint interest with her husband. A good farmer's wife
near Earlville, Ill., who had all the rights she wanted, went to
the dentist of the village, who made her a full set of false
teeth, both upper and under. The dentist pronounced them an
admirable fit, and the wife declared they gave her fits to wear
them; that she could neither chew nor talk with them in her
mouth. The dentist sued the husband; his counsel brought the wife
as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand, saying:

A married woman can not be a witness in matters of joint
interest between herself and her husband.

Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your mouths a
joint interest with your husbands, about which you are legally
incompetent to speak! If in our frequent and shocking railroad
accidents a married woman is injured in her person, in nearly all
of the States, it is her husband who must sue the company, and it
is to her husband that the damages, if there are any, will be
awarded. In Ashfield, Mass., supposed to be the most advanced of
any State in the Union in all things, humanitarian as well as
intellectual, a married woman was severely injured by a defective
sidewalk.