al
opinions.

Just as the agitation for woman's rights began in this country,
Pauline Roland began in France a vigorous demand for her rights as a
citizen. The 27th of February, 1848, she presented herself before the
electoral reunion to claim the right of nominating the mayor of the
city where she lived. Having been refused, she claimed in April of the
same year the right to take part in the elections for the Constituent
Assembly, and was again refused. On April 12, 1849, Jeanne Deroine
claimed for woman the right of eligibility by presenting herself as a
candidate for the Legislative Assembly, and she sustained this right
before the preparatory electoral reunions of Paris. On the 3d of
October Jeanne Deroine and Pauline Roland, delegates from the
fraternal associations, were elected members of the Central Committee
of the Associative Unions. This Central Committee was for the
fraternal associations what the Constituent Assembly was for the
French Republic in 1848.

_To the Convention of the Women of America_:

DEAR SISTERS:--Your courageous declaration of Woman's Rights has
resounded even to our prison, and has filled our souls with
inexpressible joy.

In France the reaction has suppressed the cry of liberty of the
women of the future. Deprived, like their brothers, of the
Democracy, of the right to civil and political equality, and the
fiscal laws which trammel the liberty of the press, hinder the
propagation of those eternal truths which must regenerate
humanity.

They wish the women of France to found a hospitable tribunal,
which shall receive the cry of the oppressed and suffering, and
vindicate in the name of humanity, solidarity, the social right
for both sexes equally; and where woman, the mother of humanity,
may claim in the name of her children, mutilated by tyranny, her
right to true liberty, to the complete development and free
exercise of all her faculties, and reveal that half of truth
which is in her, and without which no social work can be
complete.

The darkness of reaction has obscured the sun of 1848, which
seemed to rise so radiantly. Why? Because the revolutionary
tempest, in overturning at the same time the throne and the
scaffold, in breaking the chain of the black slave, forgot to
break the chain of the most oppressed of all of the pariahs of
humanity.

"T