in Ohio.

The above paper, signed by more than one hundred ladies of Lorain
county, was presented, March 14, 1870, to the legislature assembled
at Columbus. Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton, criticising the Oberlin
protestants, said:

That so many signed is not strange, because the non-suffrage side
is the popular one at present. Years hence, when it shall be
customary for women to vote, it is questionable whether the lady
who drew up that document would have many supporters.

If "we are not inferior to men," we must have as clear opinions
and as good judgment as they. To say, then, that we are not
capable of judging of political questions, is untrue. To say that
we are not interested in such things is absurd, for who can be
more anxious for good laws and good law-makers than women, who,
for the most part, have sons and daughters in this whirlpool of
temptation, called social and business life. If we are too
ignorant to have an opinion, the fault lies at our own door.

These ladies reason upon the premises that the duties imposed
upon us as we find them in this nineteenth century, are the
duties, conditions, and relations established of God. Two things
we do certainly find in the Bible with regard to this matter;
that women are to bear children, and men to earn bread. The first
duty we believe has been confined entirely to the female sex, but
the male sex have not kept the other in all cases. If anybody has
belonged for any considerable time to a benevolent institution,
he has ascertained that women sometimes are obliged to earn bread
and bear children also. A century or two ago, when women seldom
thought of writing books, or being physicians or lawyers,
professors or teachers, or doing anything but housework, probably
they thought, as the ladies of Lorain county do to-day, they were
in the blessed noonday of woman's enlightenment and happiness.
Their husbands, very likely, needed something of the same
companionship as the men of the present, but it was unpopular for
girls to attend school. If these ladies, after careful study and
thought, believe that woman suffrage will work evil in the land,
they ought to say that, rather than base it upon lack of time.
The enfranchisement of 15,000,000 women will be a balance of
power for good or evil that will need looking