The motto on the great seal of
the State, "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will
maintain," is the key-note to the successive struggles made there
to build up a community of moral, virtuous, intelligent people,
securing justice, liberty and equality to all. Iowa has been the
State to give large Republican majorities; to prohibit the
manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors by a constitutional
amendment; and to present propositions before her legislature for
eight successive sessions to give the right of suffrage to woman.
In the article on Iowa, in the American Cyclopaedia, the writer
says: "No distinction is made in law between the husband and the
wife in regard to property. One-third in value of all the real
estate of either, upon the death of the other, goes to the survivor
in fee simple. Neither is liable for the separate debts of the
other. The wife may make contracts and incur liabilities which may
be enforced by or against her in the same manner as if she was
unmarried; and so a married woman may sue and be sued without the
husband being joined in the action." Many women living in Iowa
often quote these laws with pride, showing the liberality of their
rulers as far as they go. But in new countries the number of women
that inherit property is very small compared to the number that
work all their days to help pay for their humble homes. It is in
the right to these joint earnings where the wife is most cruelly
defrauded, because the mother of a large family, who washes, irons,
cooks, bakes, patches and darns, takes care of the children, labors
from early dawn to midnight in her own home, is not supposed to
earn anything, hence owns nothing, and all the labors of a long
life, the results of her thrift and economy, belong absolutely to
the husband, so that when he dies they call it liberality for the
husband to make his partner an heir, and give her one-third of
their joint earnings.

For this chapter we are indebted to Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who moved
into this State from New York in the spring of 1855 with her
husband, who commenced the practice of law in Council Bluffs, where
they have resided ever since. Mrs. Bloomer had been the editor for
several years of a weekly paper called the _Lily_, which advocated
both temperance and woman's rights, and for the six years of its
publication was of inestimable value alike to both reforms. She was
one of the earliest champions of the woman's rights movement, and