had at the following prices: $2 per 100, 37½ cts. per dozen; or if sent by mail, $3 per 100, and 50 cts. per dozen. Packages of over 25 may be sent by express to all places on the line of the railroads at a less cost than by mail.
It is hoped that every person who reads this notice, and feels an interest in the universal diffusion of the true aim and object of the Woman's Rights agitation, will, without delay, order copies of this address to distribute gratuitously or otherwise, among their neighbors and townsmen. Should there be any wishing to aid in this work, who can not command the money necessary to purchase the Address, their orders will be cheerfully complied with free of charge.
The Committee have on hand a variety of Woman's Rights Tracts, written by S. J. May, Wendell Phillips, Elizabeth C. Stanton, Mrs. C. I. H. Nichols, Ernestine L. Rowe, T. W. Higginson, and others. Also, the Reports of the several National Woman's Rights Conventions, all of which may be had at very low prices.
All correspondence and orders for Address, petitions, etc., should be addressed to
June 22, 1854
SECOND APPEAL OF 1854.
To the Women of the State of New York:
We purpose again this winter to send petitions to our State Legislature — one, asking for the Just and Equal Rights of Woman, and one for Woman's Right of Suffrage. The latter, we think, covers the whole ground, for we can never be said to have just and equal rights until the right of suffrage is ours. Some who will gladly sign the former may shrink from making the last demand. But be assured, our cause can never rest on a safe, enduring basis, until we get the right of suffrage. So long as we have no voice in the laws, we have no guarantee that privileges granted us to-day by one body of men, may not be taken from us to-morrow by another.
All man's laws, his theology, his daily life, go to prove the fixed idea in his mind of the entire difference in the sexes — a difference so broad that what would be considered cruel and unjust between man and man, is kind and just between man and woman. Having discarded the idea of the oneness of the sexes, how can man judge of the needs and wants of a being so wholly unlike himself? How can he make laws for his own benefit and woman's too at the same time? He can not. He never has, as all his laws relative to woman most clearly show. But when man shall fully grasp the idea that woman is a being of like feelings, thoughts, and passions with himself, he may be able to legislate for her, as one code would answer for both. But until then, a sense of justice, a wise self-love, impels us to demand a voice in his councils.
To every intelligent, thinking woman, we put the question, On what sound principles of jurisprudence, constitutional law, or human rights, are one-half of the people of this State disfranchised? If you answer, as you must, that it is done in violation of all law, then we ask you, when and how is this great wrong to be righted? We say now; and petitioning is the first step in its accomplishment. We hope, therefore, that every woman in the State will sign her name to the petitions. It is humiliating to know that many educated women so stultify their consciences as to declare that they have all the rights they want. Have you who make this declaration ever read the barbarous laws in reference to woman, to mothers, to wives, and to daughters, which disgrace our Statute Books? Laws which are not surpassed in cruelty and injustice by any slaveholding code in the United States; laws which strike at the root of the glorious doctrine for which our fathers fought and bled and died, "no taxation without representation"; laws which deny a right most sacredly observed by many of the monarchies of Europe — "the right of trial by a jury of one's own peers"; laws which trample on the holiest and most unselfish of all human affections — a mother's love for her child — and with ruthless cruelty snap asunder the tenderest ties; laws which enable the father, be he a man or a minor, to tear the infant from the mother's arms and send it, if he chooses, to the Feejee Islands — yea, to will the guardianship of the unborn child to whomsoever he may please, whether to the Sultan of Turkey or the Imam of Muscat; laws by which our sons and daughters may be bound to service to cancel their father's debts of honor, in the meanest