The wrongs of woman have too long slumbered. They now begin to cry for redress. Let them be clearly pointed out in your Convention; and then, not ask as favor, but demand as right, that every civil and ecclesiastical obstacle be removed out of the way.
Rights are not dependent upon equality of mind; nor do we admit inferiority, leaving that question to be settled by future developments, when a fair opportunity shall be given for the equal cultivation of the intellect, and the stronger powers of the mind shall be called into action.
If, in accordance with your call, you ascertain "the bearing which the circumscribed sphere of woman has on the great political and social evils that curse and desolate the land," you will not have come together in vain.
May you, indeed, "gain strength" by your contest with "difficulty!" May the whole armor of "Right, Truth, and Reason" be yours! Then will the influence of the Convention be felt in the assembled wisdom of men which is to follow; and the good results, as well as your example, will ultimately rouse other States to action in this most important cause.
I herewith forward to you a "Discourse on Woman," which, though brought out by local circumstances, may yet contain principles of universal application.
Letter From Lucy Stone.
For the Woman's Rights Convention:
Dear Friends: — The friends of human freedom in Massachusetts rejoice that a Woman's Rights Convention is to be held in Ohio. We hail it as a sign of progress, and deem it especially fitting that such a Convention should be held now, when a State Constitution is to be formed.
It is easier, when the old is destroyed, to build the new right, than to right it after it is built.
The statute books of every State in the Union are disgraced by an article which limits the right to the elective franchise to "male citizens of twenty-one years of age and upwards," thus excluding one-half the population of the country from all political influence, subjecting woman to laws in the making of which she has neither vote nor voice. The lowest drunkard may come up from wallowing in the gutter, and, covered with filth, reel up to the ballot-box and deposit his vote, and his right to do so is not questioned. The meanest foreigner who comes to our shores, who can not speak his mother-tongue correctly, has secured for him the right of suffrage. The negro, crushed and degraded, as if he were not a brother man, made the lowest of the low, even he, in some of the States, can vote; but woman, in every State, is politically plunged in a degradation lower than his lowest depths.
Woman is taxed under laws made by those who profess to believe that taxation and representation are inseparable, while, in the use and imposition of the taxes, as in representation, she is absolutely without influence. Should she hint that the profession and practice do not agree, she is gravely told that "Women should not talk politics.? In most of the States the married woman loses, by her marriage, the control of her person and the right of property, and, if she is a mother, the right to her children also; while she secures what the town paupers have — the right to be maintained. The legal disabilities under which women labor have no end: I will not attempt to enumerate them. Let the earnest women who speak in your Convention enter into the detail of this thing, nor stop to "patch fig-leaves for the naked truth," but "before all Israel and the sun," expose the atrocities of the laws relative to women, until the ears of those who hear shall tingle. So that the men who meet in Convention to form the new Constitution for Ohio, shall, for very shame's sake, make haste to put away the last remnant of the barbarism which your statute book (in common with other States) retains in its inequality and injustice to woman. We know too well the stern reform spirit of those who have called