he
liberal professions; and patiently explored the whole realm of
scientific research; and yet, because in life's allotment she is
_female_, not male, _woman_, not man, the curse of inferiority cleaves
to her through all her generations. Eden's anathema was to be removed
on the coming of the second Adam; and in the new dispensation there
was to be neither male nor female. Jewish outlawry from all the
nations, continuing through almost twenty centuries, is repealed by
common consent among all civilized governments. Nor does the curse of
eternal attainder longer blast the Ethiopian race to degradation and
slavery, through Canaan's sin and shame. But where shall woman look
for her redemption in this auspicious hour, when new dawnings of
liberty, new sunrises of human enfranchisement are illumining the
world? A man once said, "where liberty is, there is my country." But
on what continent or island, or in what vast wilderness shall woman
find a nationality where she shall be taxed to support no government
she did not aid in making, obey no law she did not help to enact, nor
suffer any penalty until adjudged, by a jury, in part at least, of her
peers? True, her privileges in some States have been, after long
struggle and conflict, enlarged and increased. Like the Southern
freedmen, she has had her Civil Rights bill. But all this is
compatible with the Dred Scott decision itself. The power that gives
can take away; but of that power woman is no part. Mr. Sumner says,
"The ballot is the one thing needful to the emancipated slave."
Without it, he declares, his liberty is but an illusion, a
jack-o'lantern which he will pursue in vain. Without the ballot, he
reiterates, the slave becomes only sacrifice. And shall it not also be
pre-eminently so with woman? Formed by Almighty power a little lower
than the angels, her ruling lords and masters have, by legislative
proscription, plunged her not a little but immeasurably below myriads
of the human race, whose only boast or claim is, that for some
inscrutable reason they were so constituted as to stand _men_ in the
tables of the census.

In the American Equal Rights Association, it is determined to
prosecute an agitation which shall wake the nation to new
consciousness of the injustice long inflicted and still suffered
through proscriptive distinctions on account of sex and complexion. To
the industrial, hard-toiling, property-producing, family-supporting
women, this appeal is made to