not only of her own rights, but also of theirs. Men! we can not trust you! You have deceived us too long! Since this movement began, some laws have been passed, securing to woman her personal property, but they are as nothing in the great reform that is needed. I can tell you a case. A woman married a man, whom she did not love, because he had a fortune. He died, and she married the man whom she loved before her first marriage. He died, too, and the fortune which was hers through her first husband was seized on by the relatives of the second, and she was left penniless in the wide world. Here, as in England, women earn large sums by their literary fame and talents; and I know a man who watches the post-office, and, because the Law gives him the power, secures the letters which contain the wages of his wife's intellectual toil, and pockets them for his own use.
I will conclude by reading a letter from an esteemed friend, Mr. Higginson. It proposes certain questions which I should wish to hear our enemies answer.
Worcester, Sept. 4, 1853.
Dear Friend: — You are aware that domestic duties alone prevent my prolonging my stay in New York during the session of the Woman's Rights Convention. But you know, also, that all my sympathies are there. I hope you will have a large representation of the friends of the great movement — the most important of the century; and that you will also assemble a good many of the opposition during the discussion. Perhaps from such opponents I might obtain answers to certain questions which have harassed my mind, and are the following:
If there be a woman's sphere, as a man's sphere, why has not woman an equal voice in fixing the limits? If it be unwomanly for a girl to have a whole education, why is it not unwomanly for her to have even a half one? Should she not be left where the Turkish women are left? If women have sufficient political influence through their husbands and brothers, how is it that the worst laws are confessedly those relating to female property? If politics are necessarily corrupting, ought not good men, as well as good women, to be exhorted to quit voting? _
If, however, man's theory be correct — that none should be appointed jurors but those whose occupations fit them to understand the matters in dispute — where is the propriety of empanneling a jury of men to decide on the right of a divorced mother to her child? If it be proper for a woman to open her lips in jubilee to sing nonsense, how can it be improper for her to open them and speak sense? These afford a sample of the questions to which I have been trying in vain to find an answer. If the reasonings of men on this subject are a fair specimen of the masculine intellect of the nineteenth century, I think it is certainly quite time to call in women to do the thinking.
Yours, respectfully and cordially, T. W. Higginson.
Miss Lucy Stone.
Matilda Joslyn Gage cited the Convention to a case recently tried before the Court of Common Pleas of New York, as illustrating the husband's ownership of the wife, the Court deciding that the friends of a