ou
answer, as you must, that it is done in violation of all law, then we
ask you, when and how is this great wrong to be righted? We say now;
and petitioning is the first step in its accomplishment. We hope,
therefore, that every woman in the State will sign her name to the
petitions. It is humiliating to know that many educated women so
stultify their consciences as to declare that they have all the rights
they want. Have you who make this declaration ever read the barbarous
laws in reference to woman, to mothers, to wives, and to daughters,
which disgrace our Statute Books? Laws which are not surpassed in
cruelty and injustice by any slaveholding code in the United States;
laws which strike at the root of the glorious doctrine for which
our fathers fought and bled and died, "no taxation without
representation"; laws which deny a right most sacredly observed by
many of the monarchies of Europe--"the right of trial by a jury of
one's own peers"; laws which trample on the holiest and most unselfish
of all human affections--a mother's love for her child--and with
ruthless cruelty snap asunder the tenderest ties; laws which enable
the father, be he a man or a minor, to tear the infant from the
mother's arms and send it, if he chooses, to the Feejee Islands--yea,
to will the guardianship of the _unborn_ child to whomsoever he may
please, whether to the Sultan of Turkey or the Imam of Muscat; laws by
which our sons and daughters may be bound to service to cancel their
father's debts of _honor_, in the meanest rum-holes and brothels in
the vast metropolis; laws which violate all that is most pure and
sacred in the marriage relation, by giving to the cruel, beastly
drunkard the rights of a man, a husband, and father; laws which place
the life-long earnings of the wife at the disposal of the husband, be
his character what it may; laws which leave us at the mercy of the
rum-seller and the drunkard, against whom we have no protection for
our lives, our children, or our homes; laws by which we are made the
watch-dogs to keep a million and a half of our sisters in the foulest
bondage the sun ever shone upon--which forbid us to give food and
shelter to the panting fugitive from the land of slavery.

If, in view of laws like these, there be women in this State so lost
to self-respect, to all that is virtuous, noble, and true, as to
refuse to raise their voices in protest against such degrading
tyranny, we can only say of that system