ttee that neither the State nor the
nation can have peace on this suffrage question until some fair
standard shall be adopted which is not based on religion, or
color, or sex, or any accident of birth--a test which shall be
applicable to every adult human being. In a republic the ballot
belongs to every intelligent adult person who is innocent of
crime. There is an obvious and sufficient reason for excluding
minors, state-prison convicts, imbeciles and insane persons, but
does the public safety require that we shall place the women of
Connecticut with infants, criminals, idiots and lunatics? Do they
deserve the classification? It seems to your committee that to
enfranchise woman--or rather to cease to deprive her of the
ballot, which is of right hers, would be reciprocally beneficial.
We believe that it would elevate the character of our
office-holders; that it would purify our politics; that it would
render our laws more equitable; that it would give to woman a
protection against half the perils which now beset her; that it
would put into her hands a key that would unlock the door of
every respectable occupation and profession; that it would insure
a reconstruction of our statute laws on a basis of justice, so
that a woman should have a right to her own children, and a right
to receive and enjoy the proceeds of her own labor. John Neal
estimates that the ballot is worth fifty cents a day to every
American laborer, enabling each man to command that much higher
wages. Does not gentlemanly courtesy, as well as equal justice,
require that that weapon of defense shall be given to those
thousands of working women among us who are going down to
prostitution through three or four half-paid, over-crowded
occupations?

It is said that woman is now represented by her husband, when she
has one; but what is this representation worth when in
Connecticut, two years ago, all of the married woman's personal
property became absolutely her husband's, including even her
bridal presents, to sell or give away, as he saw fit--a statute
which still prevails in most of the States? What is that
representation worth when even now, in this State, no married
woman has the right to the use of her own property, and no woman,
even a widow, is the natural guardian of h