and give their strength to the cause of
reform which is now agitating the minds of the people?

What is woman? The answer is returned to me in tones that shake my
very soul. She is the mother of mankind! The living providence, under
God, who gives to every human being its mental, moral, and physical
organism--who stamps upon every human heart her seal for good or for
evil! Who then, but she, should cry aloud, and spare not, when the
children she has borne--forgetting their allegiance to her and their
duty to themselves, have assumed the power to rule over her, shutting
her out from their counsels, and surrounding her, without her own
consent, with circumstances which lead to misery and death; and, in
their pride and strength, trampling upon justice, love, and mercy,
withering her heart by violence and oppression, and yet compelling
her, in her dependence as a wife, to perpetuate in her offspring their
own depraved appetites and disorganized faculties?

It will not be denied that woman in all past ages has been made, by
both law and custom, the inferior of her own children. Man has assumed
to himself the power of being "lord of creation"; yet what has he done
for his kind? Look at the present state of society and receive your
answer! He has filled the world with madness, with oppression and
wrong; he has allowed snares to be laid at every turn, to entangle the
feet of our children, and lead them away into vice and crime. He has
legalized the causes which fill the jails, the penitentiaries, the
houses of correction, the poorhouses, and asylums with the blood of
our hearts, even our children, and our children's children. There is
not a drunkard in the land, not a criminal that has been made by
strong drink, but is the child of a woman. Yet not one woman's vote
has ever been given to legalize the sale of ardent spirits, that have
maddened the brain of her child. No woman's vote ever sanctioned the
rum-seller's bar, at which her husband has bartered away his manhood,
and made himself more vile than the brutes that perish.

Shall I be answered that woman's home influence must keep her children
and her husband in the paths of virtue and honor? What! disfranchised
woman--made by her law-maker an appendage to himself, her intellect
shackled, her labor underrated, her physical power dwarfed and
enfeebled by custom--is she expected to do this mighty thing? I hear
again an answer--"Woman is responsible for the moral atmosphere th