e
may be permitted. One lady upon seeing the invitation to the
meeting exclaimed: "This little bit of paper is an indication of
a higher civilization than I supposed we had yet entered upon.
Until recently it has been like the betrayal of a secret for a
woman, particularly for an unmarried woman, to have a birthday."
This exclamation but expresses a historical fact and a prophetic
truth. So long as woman's only value depended upon physical
charms, the years which destroyed them were deemed enemies. The
fact that an unmarried woman's sixty-second birthday can be
celebrated, shows the dawning of the idea that the loss of youth
and its fresh beauty may be more than compensated by the higher
charms of intellectual attainments. The time will never come when
women, or men either, will delight in the possession of
crows-feet, gray hairs and wrinkles; but the time will come, aye,
and now is, when they will view these blemishes as but a petty
price to pay for the joy of new knowledge, for the deeper joy of
closer contact with humanity, and for the deepest joy of worthy
work well done.

The first legislative hearing since 1860, was that granted
January, 1871, to Miss Amanda Way and Mrs. Emma B. Swank. The two
houses received them in joint session, the lieutenant-governor and
speaker of the house occupying the speaker's desk. Mr. William
Cumback introduced Miss Way, who read the following memorial:

_Mr. President and Gentlemen_--We come before you as a
committee appointed by the Woman Suffrage Association to
memorialize your honorable body in behalf of the women of
Indiana. We ask you to take the necessary steps to so amend
the State constitution as to secure to women the right of
suffrage. We believe the extension of the full rights of
citizenship to all the people of the State, is in accordance
with the fundamental principles of a just government. We
believe that as woman has an equal interest with man in all
public questions, she should therefore have an equal voice
in their decision. We believe that as woman's life,
prosperity and happiness are equally dependent upon the
order and morality of society, she should have an equal
voice in the laws regulating her surroundings. We bel