e can not see or feel, and yet can any misery be more real than
invidious distinctions on the ground of sex in the laws and
constitution, in the political, religious, and moral position of those
who in nature stand the peers of each other? And not only do such
women suffer these ever-recurring indignities in daily life, but the
literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely
decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science,
philosophy, poetry, and song.

And here is the secret of the infinite sadness of women of genius; of
their dissatisfaction with life, in exact proportion to their
development. A woman who occupies the same realm of thought with man,
who can explore with him the depths of science, comprehend the steps
of progress through the long past and prophesy those of the momentous
future, must ever be surprised and aggravated with his assumptions of
headship and superiority, a superiority she never concedes, an
authority she utterly repudiates. Words can not describe the
indignation, the humiliation a proud woman feels for her sex in
disfranchisement.

In a republic where all are declared equal an ostracised class of one
half of the people, on the ground of a distinction founded in nature,
is an anomalous position, as harassing to its victims as it is unjust,
and as contradictory as it is unsafe to the fundamental principles of
a free government. When we remember that out of this degraded
political status, spring all the special wrongs that have blocked
woman's success in the world of work, and degraded her labor
everywhere to one half its value; closed to her the college doors and
all opportunities for higher education, forbade her to practice in the
professions, made her a cipher in the church, and her sex, her
motherhood a curse in all religions; her subjection a text for bibles,
a target for the priesthood; seeing all this, we wonder now as then at
the indifference and injustice of our best men when the first
opportunity offered in which the women of any State might have secured
their enfranchisement.

It was not from ignorance of the unequal laws, and false public
sentiment against woman, that our best men stood silent in this Kansas
campaign; it was not from lack of chivalry that they thundered forth
no protests, when they saw noble women, who had been foremost in every
reform, hounded through the State by foul mouthed politicians; it was
not from lack of money and pow