uence and example from
patriotic and philanthropic movements, and that men who deny
women to be their peers, and who shut them out from exercising a
fair share of power in the body politic, are arrogant usurpers,
whose only apology is to be found in prejudices transmitted from
half-civilized and half-christianized ages.

WHEREAS, The family is the nursery of the State and the
Church--the God-appointed seminary of the human race. Therefore

3. _Resolved_, That the family, by men as well as women, should
be held more sacred than all other institutions; that it may not,
without sin, be abandoned or neglected by fathers any more than
by mothers, for the sake of any of the institutions devised by
men--for the government of the State or the Nation any more than
for the voluntary association of social reformers.

4. _Resolved_, That women's duties and rights as daughters,
sisters, wives, and mothers, are not bounded within the circle of
home; that in view of the sacredness of their relations, they are
not free to desert their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons
amidst scenes of business, politics, and pleasure, and to leave
them alone in their struggles and temptations, but that as
members of the human family, for the sake of human advancement,
women are bound as widely as possible to give to men the
influence of their aid and presence; and finally, that universal
experience attests that those nations and societies are most
orderly, high-toned, and rich in varied prosperity, where women
most freely intermingle with men in all spheres of active life.

5. _Resolved_, That the fundamental error of the whole structure
of legislation and custom, whereby women are practically
sustained, even in this republic, is the preposterous fiction of
law, that in the eye of the law the husband and wife are one
person, that person being the husband; that this falsehood
itself, the deposit of barbarism, tends perpetually to brutalize
the marriage relation by subjecting wives as irresponsible tools
to the capricious authority of husbands; that this degradation of
married women re-acts inevitably to depress the condition of
single women, by impairing their own self-respect and man's
respect for them; and that the final result is that system of
tutelage miscall