anging the laws, customs and conditions of this mutual state.
Whether marriage be a purely business partnership for the care
and maintenance of children, or whether it be a sacrament to
which the benediction of the church gives peculiar sanctity and
perpetuity and makes the parties "no more twain but one flesh,"
in either case it is an absurdity, which we only tolerate because
of custom, for men alone to make all the regulations and
stipulations concerning it.

This unnatural and strained assumption by one sex of the control
of everything relating to marriage, and the equally unnatural and
mischievous passivity on the part of the other, have given birth
to the meek maiden waiting for her fate, to the typical
disconsolate and forlorn "superfluous woman," to the two
standards of morality for the sexes, to the mercenary marriage
with all its attendant miseries, to the selfish, exacting,
querulous wife, to the disappointed or tyrannical husband; and of
late, with the wider possibilities of individual pleasure and
satisfaction, to the growing aversion of young people to
matrimony, and the rush of women to the divorce courts for
freedom from the galling bonds; all these and a thousand
variations of each, until the nature of both sexes is so
perverted that it is impossible to decide what is nature.

A letter was read from Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage (N. Y.) urging women
individually to petition Senators and Representatives for the removal
of their political disabilities, because by this means these men were
compelled to think on the question.

Mrs. Virginia L. Minor (Mo.) addressed the convention on The Law of
Federal Suffrage, a legal argument on the right to vote conferred by
the Constitution. Miss Anthony supplemented Mrs. Minor's argument with
a history of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which she said:

When that Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion--when it was
proposed to put the word "male" into the second section--it read:
"If any State shall disfranchise any of its citizens on account
of color, all of that class shall be counted out of the basis of
representation." But there were timid souls on the floor of
Congress at the close of the war, as well as at other periods of
our history, and to prevent the enfranchisement of women by this
amendment they moved to make it read: