our nation is doomed to destruction.  What more fitting element than the noble type of American womanhood, who have taught our Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen the rudiments of all they know.

Think of all the foreigners and all our own native-born ignorant men who can not write their own names or read the Declaration of Independence making laws for such women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.  Think of jurors drawn from these ranks to watch and try young girls for crimes often committed against them when the male criminal goes free.  Think of a single one of these votes on election day outweighing all the women in the country.  Is it not humiliating for me to sit, a political cipher, and see the colored man in my employ, to whom I have taught the alphabet, go out on election day and say by his vote what shall be done with my tax money.  How would you like it?

When we think of the wives trampled on by husbands whom the law has taught them to regard as inferior beings, and of the mothers whose children are torn from their arms by the direct behest of the law at the bidding of a dead or living father, when we think of these things, our hearts ache with pity and indignation.

If mothers could only realize how the laws which they have no voice in making and no power to change affect them at every point, how they enter every door, whether palace or hovel, touch, limit, and bind, every article and inmate from the smallest child up, no woman, however shrinking and delicate, can escape it, they would get beyond the meaningless cry, “I have all the rights I want.”  Do these women know that in most States in the Union the shameful fact that no woman has any legal rights to her own child, except it is born out of wedlock!  In these States there is not a line of positive law to protect the mother; the father is the legal protector and guardian of the children.

    Under the laws of most of the States to-day a husband may by his
    last will bequeath his child away from its mother, so that she
    might, if the guardian chose, never see it again.

The husband may have been a very bad man, and in a moment of anger made the will.  The guardian he has appointed may turn out a malicious man, and take pleasure in tormenting the mother, or he may bring up the children in a way that the mother thinks ruinous to them, and she has no redress in law.  Why do not all the fortunate mothers in the land cry out against such a law?  Why do not all women say, “Inasmuch as the law has done this wrong unto the least of these my sisters it has done it unto me.”  It is true that men are almost always better than their laws, but while a bad law remains on the statute-books it gives to an unscrupulous man a right to be as bad as the law.

It is often said to us when all the women ask for the ballot it will be granted.