the injustice of excluding girls from the scientific schools and polytechnic institutions in the State. He says:
I would especially call the attention of the legislature to the importance of furnishing to women such educational facilities as will better fit them for the industrial pursuits which the true progress of the times is opening to them. On the rights of married women, he says:
While our laws with regard to married women have been amended from time to time for several years past, so as to secure to them in a more ample manner their property, held before or acquired after marriage, yet we are still considerably behind many of our sister States, and even conservative England, in our legislation on the subject. I would recommend to your favorable consideration such an amendment of our laws as will secure to a married woman all her property, with the full control of it during her married life, and free from liability for any debts, except those contracted by herself or for which she has voluntarily made herself responsible, with the same right on the part of the husband to an interest in her property, on his surviving her, that she now has, or that it may be best to give her, in his.
On the subject of divorce the governor says:
I recommend a revision of our laws with regard to divorce. According to the report of the State librarian there were in the State last year 4,734 marriages and 478 divorces. Discontented people come here from other States, to take advantage of what is called our liberal legislation, to obtain divorces which would be denied them at home. As the sacredness of the marriage relation lies at the foundation of civilized society, it should be carefully guarded. Under our present laws the causes of divorce are too numerous, and not sufficiently defined, and too wide a discretion is given to the courts. I think the law of 1849 should be modified, and so much of the statute as grants divorces for "any such misconduct as permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner, and defeats the purposes of the marriage relation," should be repealed. I would also suggest that the law provide that no decree of divorce shall take effect till one year after it is granted.
In conversation with the governor on this point in his message he stated the singular fact that the majority of the applications for divorce were made by women. If this be so, we suggested that the laws of Connecticut should stand as they are until the women have the right of suffrage, that they may have a voice in a social arrangement in which they have an equal interest with man himself. If Connecticut, with its blue laws, disloyal Hartford convention, and Democracy, has, nevertheless, been a Canada for fugitive wives from the yoke of matrimony, pray keep that little State, like an oasis in the desert, sacred to sad wives, at least until the sixteenth amendment of the federal constitution shall give the women of the republic the right to say whether they are ready to make marriage, under all circumstances, for better or worse, an indissoluble tie. We have grave doubts as to the sacredness of a relation in which the subject-class has no voice whatever in the laws that regulate it. We shall never know what "laws lie at the foundation of all civilized society" until woman's thought finds expression in the State, the church and the home. It is presumption for man longer to legislate alone on this vital question, when woman, too, should have a word to say in the matter. The morning after the convention we had a pleasant breakfast under Mr. and Mrs. Hooker's hospitable roof, where Boston and New York amicably broke bread and discussed the fifteenth amendment together. All the wise and witty sayings that passed around that social board, time fails to chronicle.
In 1877 Governor Hubbard called the attention of the legislature to the wrongs of married women, in the following words:
There has been for the last few years in this State much slip-shod and fragmentary legislation in respect to the property rights of married women. The old common law assumed the subjugation of the wife, and stripped her of the better part of her rights of person and nearly all her rights of property. It is a matter of astonishment that Christian nations should have been willing for eighteen centuries to hold the mothers of their race in a condition of legal servitude. It has been the scandal of jurisprudence.
