nd while any such statutes remain on the books, no good
man will cease to exert himself for their removal. I ask the
right to vote, not because it would create antagonism, but
because it would create harmony. I want to do away with
antagonism by removing oppression, for where oppression exists,
there antagonism must exist also.

ERNESTINE L. ROSE: In allusion to the law respecting wills, I
wish to say that, according to the Revised Statutes of our State,
a married woman has not a right to make a will. The law says that
wills may be made by all persons, except idiots, persons of
unsound mind, married women, and infants. Mark well, all but
idiots, lunatics, married women, and infants. Male infants ought
to consider it quite an insult to be placed in the same category
with married women. No, a married woman has no right to bequeath
a dollar of the property, no matter how much she may have brought
into the marriage, or accumulated in it. Not a dollar to a
friend, a relative, or even to her own child, to keep him from
starving. And this is the law in the nineteenth century, in the
enlightened United States, under a Republic that declares all men
to be free and equal.

LUCY STONE: Just one word. I think Mrs. Rose is a little
mistaken; I wish to correct her by saying that of some States
in--

Mrs. ROSE: I did not say this was the universal law; I said it
was the law in the State of New York.

LUCY STONE: I was not paying close attention, and must have been
mistaken. In Massachusetts the law makes a married woman's will
valid in two cases: the first is, where the consent of her
husband is written on the will; the second, where she wills all
she has to her husband, in which case his written consent is not
deemed requisite.

Dr. HARRIOT K. HUNT spoke on the fruitful theme of taxation
without representation! and read her annual protest[120] to the
authorities of Boston against being compelled to submit to that
injustice. She said: I wish to vote, that women may have, by law,
an equal right with men in property. In October, 1851, I went to
pay my taxes in Boston. Going into the Assessor's office, I saw a
tall, thin, weak, stupid-looking Irish boy. It was near election
time, and I looked at him scrutinizingly. He held in his hand a
do