f the women of this nation know nothing
about the laws, yet all their specially barbarous legislation is
for woman. Where have they made any provision for her to learn
the laws? Where is the Law School for our daughters? where the
law office, the bar, or the bench, now urging them to take part
in the jurisprudence of the nation?

[Illustration: ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (with autograph).]

But, say you, does not separation cover all these difficulties?
No one objects to separation when the parties are so disposed.
But, to separation there are two very serious objections. First,
so long as you insist on marriage as a divine institution, as an
indissoluble tie, so long as you maintain your present laws
against divorce, you make separation, even, so odious, that the
most noble, virtuous, and sensitive men and women choose a life
of concealed misery, rather than a partial, disgraceful release.
Secondly, those who, in their impetuosity and despair, do, in
spite of public sentiment, separate, find themselves in their new
position beset with many temptations to lead a false, unreal
life. This isolation bears especially hard on woman. Marriage is
not all of life to man. His resources for amusement and
occupation are boundless. He has the whole world for his home.
His business, his politics, his club, his friendships with either
sex, can help to fill up the void made by an unfortunate union or
separation. But to woman, marriage is all and everything; her
sole object in life--that for which she is educated--the subject
of all her sleeping and her waking dreams. Now, if a noble,
generous girl of eighteen marries, and is unfortunate, because
the cruelty of her husband compels separation, in her dreary
isolation, would you drive her to a nunnery; and shall she be a
nun indeed? Her solitude is nothing less, as, in the present
undeveloped condition of woman, it is only through our fathers,
brothers, husbands, sons, that we feel the pulsations of the
great outer world.

One unhappy, discordant man or woman in a neighborhood, may mar
the happiness of all the rest. You can not shut up discord, any
more than you can small-pox. There can be no morality where there
is a settled discontent. A very wise father once remarked, that
in the government of his children, h