ntract of marriage, its
obligations, duties, responsibilities, and the very basis on
which it rests. The rules of the common law on this subject have
been dispelled, routed, and justly so, by the acts of 1860 and
1862. They are things of the past which have succumbed to more
liberal and just views, like many other doctrines of the common
law which could not stand the scrutiny and analysis of modern
civilization.

The utter insecurity of woman without the ballot is shown in the
reversal of this decision within a few months, by the Court of
Appeals, on the ground that it would be "contrary to the policy of
the law, and destructive to the conjugal union and tranquility
which it had always been the object of the law to guard and
protect." Could satire go farther? We record with satisfaction the
fact that Judge Danforth uttered a strong dissenting opinion.

The friends of woman suffrage in the legislature of 1884 secured
the passage of a bill empowering women to vote on all questions of
taxation submitted to a popular vote in the village of Union
Springs. Governor Cleveland was urged to veto it; but after hearing
all the objections he signed the bill and it became a law.

At Clinton, Oneida county, twenty-two women voted on June 21, 1884,
at an election on the question of establishing water-works. Eight
voted for the tax, fourteen against it. Fifteen other women
appeared at the polls, but were excluded from voting because,
though they were real-estate tax-payers, the assessor had left
their names off the tax-roll. Judge Theodore W. Dwight, president
of the Columbia Law School, pronounced women tax-payers entitled to
vote under the general water-works act, and therefore that the
election-officials violated the law in refusing to accept the votes
of the women whose names were omitted from the assessors' tax-list.

In 1879, there was a report of the committee to allow widows an
active voice in the settlement of the family estate and to have the
sole guardianship of minor children. A petition in favor of the
bill had upon it the names of such well-known men as Peter Cooper,
George William Curtis, Henry Bergh and J. W. Simonton.

September 13, 1879, Mrs. MacDonald of Boston argued her own case
before the United States Circuit Court in New York city, in a
patent suit. It was a marked event in court circles, she being the
first lady pleader that ever appeared in that court, and the second
w