There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming outrage:  she was a bad woman.  No:  she was “a lady of the highest respectability.”  No charge was made against her; but, being left a widow, she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as appears, the court took from her the guardianship of her own children,—­bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for whom she had borne the deepest physical agony of womanhood,—­and awarded them to somebody else.

You say, “But her second husband might have misused the children.”  Might?  So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to protect them.  Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a half-dozen successive marriages, have brought stepmother after stepmother to control these children, and no court could have interfered.  The father is recognized before the law as the natural guardian of the children.  The mother, even though she be left a widow, is not.  The consequence is a series of outrages of which only a few scattered instances come before the public; just as in slavery, out of a hundred little girls sold away from their parents, only one case might ever be mentioned in any newspaper.

This case led to an alteration of the law in Massachusetts, but the same thing might yet happen in some States of the Union.  The possibility of a single such occurrence shows that there is still a fundamental wrong in the legal position of woman.  And the fact that most women do not know it only deepens the wrong—­as Dr. Channing said of the contentment of the Southern slaves.  The mass of men, even of lawyers, pass by such things, as they formerly passed by the facts of slavery.

There is no lasting remedy for these wrongs, except to give woman the political power to protect herself.  There never yet existed a race, nor a class, nor a sex, which was noble enough to be trusted with political power over another sex, or class, or race.  It is for self-defence that woman needs the ballot.  And in view of a single such occurrence as I have given, I charge that woman who professes to have “all the rights she wants,” either with a want of all feeling of motherhood, or with “ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.”

SENSE ENOUGH TO VOTE

There is one special point on which men seem to me rather insincere toward women.  When they speak to women, the objection made to their voting is usually that they are too angelic.  But when men talk to each other, the general assumption is, that women should not vote because they have not brains enough—­or, as old Theophilus Parsons wrote a century ago, have not “a sufficient acquired discretion.”

It is an important difference.  Because, if women are too angelic to vote, they can only be fitted for it by becoming more wicked, which is not desirable.  On the other hand, if there is no objection but the want of brains, then our public schools are equalizing that matter fast enough.  Still, there are plenty of people who have never got beyond this objection.  Listen to the first discussion that you encounter among men on this subject, wherever they may congregate.  Does it turn upon the question of saintliness, or of brains?  Let us see.