te 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 cannot testify in 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 a dentist of the
village and had 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 cannot 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 are 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. 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
individu