Her husband sued the corporation and recovered $13,000
damages. And those $13,000 belong to him _bona fide_; and
whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of it to supply
her needs she must ask her husband for it; and if the man be of a
narrow, selfish, niggardly nature, she will have to hear him say,
every time:

"What have you done, my dear, with the twenty-five cents I
gave you yesterday?"

Isn't such a position, I ask you, humiliating enough to be called
"servitude"? That husband, as would any other husband, in nearly
every State of this Union, sued and obtained damages for the loss
of the services of his wife, precisely as the master, under the
old slave regime, would have done, had his slave been thus
injured, and precisely as he himself would have done had it been
his ox, cow, or horse instead of his wife. There is an old saying
that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," and I
submit if the deprivation by law of the ownership of one's own
person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as an
individual, to sue and be sued, and to testify in the courts, is
not a condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, though
under the sacred name of marriage?

Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married
women? I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of
England prevails in every State in this Union, except where the
Legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. And I am
ashamed that not one State has yet blotted from its statute books
the old common law of marriage, by which Blackstone, summed up in
the fewest words possible, is made to say: "Husband and wife are
one, and that one is the husband."

Thus may all married women, wives, and widows, by the laws of the
several States, be technically included in the XV. Amendment's
specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous.
And not only married women, but I will also prove to you that by
all the great fundamental principles of our free government, the
entire womanhood of the nation is in a "condition of servitude"
as surely as were our revolutionary fathers, when they rebelled
against old King George. Women are taxed without representation,
governed without their consent, tried, convicted, and pu