certain and lasting, her degradation more helpless and complete.
In the course of her argument Lucy Stone said:
The claims we make at these conventions are self-evident truths.
The second resolution affirms the right of human beings to their
persons and earnings. Is not that self-evident? Yet the common law,
which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is modified
only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the "custody" of the
wife's person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even
against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what
weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them
for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal
property, which he may will entirely away from her, also the use of
her real estate, and in some of the States married women, insane
persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will;
so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common
with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has
taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases. And
what is our position politically? The foreigner, the negro, the
drunkard, all are entrusted with the ballot, all placed by men
politically higher than their own mothers, wives, sisters and
daughters! The woman who, seeing this, dares not maintain her
rights is the one to hang her head and blush. We ask only for
justice and equal rights--the right to vote, the right to our own
earnings, equality before the law; these are the Gibraltar of our
cause.
Rev. Antoinette Brown, the first woman ever ordained to preach,
declared:
Man can not represent woman. They differ in their nature and
relations. The law is wholly masculine; it is created and executed
by man. The framers of all legal compacts are restricted to the
masculine standpoint of observation, to the thoughts, feelings and
biases of man. The law then can give us no representation as women,
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