seriousness, "What do you women want? What are you aiming at?"
Many have manifested a laudable curiosity to know what the wives
and daughters could complain of in republican America, where
their sires and sons have so bravely fought for freedom and
gloriously secured their independence, trampling all tyranny,
bigotry, and caste in the dust, and declaring to a waiting world
the divine truth that all men are created equal. What can woman
want under such a government? Admit a radical difference in sex,
and you demand different spheres--water for fish, and air for
birds.

It is impossible to make the Southern planter believe that his
slave feels and reasons just as he does--that injustice and
subjection are as galling as to him--that the degradation of
living by the will of another, the mere dependent on his caprice,
at the mercy of his passions, is as keenly felt by him as his
master. If you can force on his unwilling vision a vivid picture
of the negro's wrongs, and for a moment touch his soul, his logic
brings him instant consolation. He says, the slave does not feel
this as I would. Here, gentlemen, is our difficulty: When we
plead our cause before the law-makers and savants of the
republic, they can not take in the idea that men and women are
alike; and so long as the mass rest in this delusion, the public
mind will not be so much startled by the revelations made of the
injustice and degradation of woman's position as by the fact that
she should at length wake up to a sense of it.

If you, too, are thus deluded, what avails it that we show by
your statute books that your laws are unjust--that woman is the
victim of avarice and power? What avails it that we point out the
wrongs of woman in social life; the victim of passion and lust?
You scorn the thought that she has any natural love of freedom
burning in her breast, any clear perception of justice urging her
on to demand her rights.

Would to God you could know the burning indignation that fills
woman's soul when she turns over the pages of your statute books,
and sees there how like feudal barons you freemen hold your
women. Would that you could know the humiliation she feels for
sex, when she thinks of all the beardless boys in your law
offices, learning these ideas of one-sided j