Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/660

Lucy Stone, on taking the chair, said: I am sure that all present will agree with me that this is a day of congratulation. It is our Seventh Annual National Woman's Rights Convention. Our first effort was made in a small room in Boston, where a few women were gathered, who had learned woman's rights by woman's wrongs. There had been only one meeting in Ohio, and two in New York. The laws were yet against us, custom was against us, prejudice was against us, and more than all, women were against us. We were strong only "in the might of our right"—and, now, when this seventh year has brought us together again, we can say as did a laborer in the Republican party, though all is not gained, "we are without a wound in our faith, without a wound in our hope, and stronger than when we began." Never before has any reformatory movement gained so much in so short a time. When we began, the statute books were covered with laws against women, which an eminent jurist (Judge Walker) said would be a disgrace to the statute books of any heathen nation.

Now almost every Northern State has more or less modified its laws. The Legislature of Maine, after having granted nearly all other property rights to wives, found a bill before it asking that a wife should be entitled to what she earns, but a certain member grew fearful that wives would bring in bills for their daily service, and, by an eloquent appeal to pockets, the measure was lost for the time, but that which has secured other rights will secure this. In Massachusetts, by the old laws, a wife owned nothing but the fee simple in her real estate. And even for that, she could not make a will without the written endorsement of her husband, permitting her to do so. Two years ago the law was so changed that she now holds the absolute right to her entire property, earnings included. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island have also very much amended their statutes. New York, the proud Empire State, has, by the direct effort of this movement, secured to wives every property right except earnings. During two years a bill has been before the Legislature, which provides that if a husband be a drunkard, a profligate, or has abandoned his wife, she may have a right to her own earnings. It has not passed. Two hundred years hence that bill will be quoted as a proof of the barbarism of the times; now it is a proof of progress.

Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana have also very materially modified their laws. And Wisconsin—God bless these young States—has granted almost all that has been asked except the right of suffrage. And even this, Senator Sholes,^[1] in an able minority report on the subject, said, "is only a question of time, and as sure to triumph as God is just." It proposed that the Convention which meets in two years to amend the Constitution of the State should consider the subject. In Michigan, too, it has been moved that women should have a right to their own babies, which none of you, ladies, have here in New York. The motion caused much discussion in the Legislature, and it would probably have been carried had not a disciple of Brigham Young's, a Mormon member, defeated the bill. In Nebraska everything is bright for our cause. Mrs. Bloomer is there, and she has circulated petitions, claiming for women the right to vote. A bill to that effect passed the House of Representatives, and was lost in the Senate, only because of the too early closing of the session. That act of justice to woman would be gained in Nebraska first, and scores of

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1. At the close of chapter on Indiana, p. 315.