a forcible address entitled, Are American Women Civil and Political Slaves? She proved the affirmative of her question by quoting the spoken and written declarations of the greatest statesmen on the right of individual representation and the exceptions made against women, citing Walker, the legal writer: "This language applied to males would be the exact definition of political slavery; applied to females, custom does not so regard it."
Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway (Ore.) described the recent arbitrary and unwarranted disfranchisement of the women of Washington Territory. Frederick Douglass was loudly called for and in responding expressed his gratitude to women, "who were chiefly instrumental in liberating my people from actual chains of bondage," and declared his full belief in their right to the franchise.
Mrs. Helen M. Gougar (Ind.) made a strong speech upon Partisan or Patriot? In her address on Woman in Marriage Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby, editor of the Woman's Tribune, said:
The one great mistake of the ages—since woman lost her primal independence and supremacy—to which is due all the sins and sorrows growing out of the association of the sexes, has been in making woman a passive agent instead of an equal factor in arranging the laws, customs and conditions of this mutual state. Whether marriage be a purely business partnership for the care and maintenance of children, or whether it be a sacrament to which the benediction of the church gives peculiar sanctity and perpetuity and makes the parties "no more twain but one flesh," in either case it is an absurdity, which we only tolerate because of custom, for men alone to make all the regulations and stipulations concerning it.
This unnatural and strained assumption by one sex of the control