that woman in any age had done or dared. With reverent lips we mention the names of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lydia Mana Child, Maria Weston Chapman, Mary S. Parker, Abby Kelly, whose burning words of rebuke aroused a sleeping nation to a newborn love of liberty. To their brave deeds, pure lives, and glowing eloquence, we pay our tributes of esteem and admiration.
To such as these Jet South Carolina and Massachusetts build future monuments, not in Quincy granite, or Parian marble, but in more enduring blessing to the people; inviolable homesteads for the laborer; free schools and colleges for boys and girls, both black and white; justice and mercy in the alms-house, jail, prison, and the marts of trade, thus securing equal rights to all.
WOMAN'S EARLY POLITICAL RIGHTS.
In Massachusetts, women voted at an early day. First, under the Old Province Charter, from 1691 to 1780, for all elective officers; second, they voted under the Constitution for all elective officers except the Governor, Council, and Legislature, from 1780 to 1785. The Bill of Rights, adopted with the Constitution of 1780, declared that all men were born free and equal. Upon this, some slaves demanded their freedom, and their masters yielded.[1] Restrictions upon the right of suffrage were very great in this State; church membership alone excluded for thirty years three-fourths of the male inhabitants from the ballot-box.[2]
That women exercised the right of suffrage amid so many restrictions, is very significant of the belief in her right to the ballot, by those early Fathers.[3]
THE FIRST STEP IN MASSACHUSETTS.
Woman's rights petitions were circulated in Massachusetts as early as 1848. Mary Upton Ferrin, of Salem, in the spring of that year, consulting Samuel Merritt, known as "the honest lawyer of Salem," in regard to the property rights of married women, and the divorce laws, learned that the whole of the wife's personal property belonged to the husband, as also the improvements upon her real estate; and that she could only retain her silver and other small valuables by
- ↑ Atlantic Monthly, June, 1871.
- ↑ In three New England colonies church membership was required for the franchise. — Frothingham, "Rise of the Republic."
- ↑ Dr. John Weis, of New York, now an aged gentleman, well remembers his grandmother saying, that at an early day women were allowed to vote in all the New England colonies.
