Does not the law of the United States
give the slaveholder the ownership of the slave? And don't you break
it every time you help a slave to Canada? Well, the law which gives
the father the sole ownership of the children is just as wicked and
I'll break it just as quickly. You would die before you would deliver
a slave to his master, and I will die before I will give up that child
to its father."

Susan escaped arrest as she thought she would, for Dr. Phelps could
not afford the unfavorable publicity involved. He managed to kidnap
his child on her way to Sunday School, but his wife eventually won a
divorce through the help of her friends.

The most trying part of this experience for Susan was the attitude of
Garrison and Phillips, who, had now for the second time failed to
recognize that the freedom they claimed for the Negro was also
essential for women. They believed in woman's rights, to be sure, but
when these rights touched the institution of marriage, their vision
was clouded. Just a year before, they had fought Mrs. Stanton's
divorce resolutions because they were unable to see that the existing
laws of marriage did not apply equally to men and women. Now they
sustained the father's absolute right over his child. What was it,
Susan wondered, that kept them from understanding? Was it loyalty to
sex, was it an unconscious clinging to dominance and superiority, or
was it sheer inability to recognize women as human beings like
themselves? "Very many abolitionists," she wrote in her diary, "have
yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights."[133]

FOOTNOTES:

[109] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I. p. 689. Henry Ward Beecher's
speech, _The Public Function of Women_, delivered at Cooper Union,
Feb. 2, 1860, was widely distributed as a tract.

[110] April 16, 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.

[111] June 16, 1857, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[112] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 717.

[113] _Ibid._, p. 725.

[114] _Ibid._, p. 732.

[115] _Ibid._, p. 735.

[116] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 196.

[117] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, _Eighty Years and More_ (New York,
1898), p. 219. Samuel Longfellow whispered to Mrs. Stanton in the
midst of the debate, "Nevertheless you are right and the convention
will sustain you."

[118] Harper, _Anthony_, I. p. 195.

[119] _Ibid._, p. 197.

[120] Aug. 25, 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College
Library.

[121] Charles S