Even the smallest human right denied, is large.  The fact that the ruling class withhold this right is prima facie evidence that they deem it of importance for good or for evil.  In either case, therefore, the human being is outraged.  It, perchance, may matter but little whether Kansas be governed by a constitution made by her bona fide settlers or by people of another State or by Congress; but for Kansas to be denied the right to make her own constitution and laws is an outrage not to be tolerated.  So the constitution and laws of a State and nation may be just as considerate of woman’s needs and wants as if framed by herself, yet for man to deny her the right to a voice in making and administering them, is paralleled only by the Lecompton usurpation.  For any human being or class of human beings, whether black, white, male or female, tamely to submit to the denial of their right to self-government shows that the instinct of liberty has been blotted out.

You blunder on this question of woman’s rights just where thousands of others do.  You believe woman unlike man in her nature; that conditions of life which any man of spirit would sooner die than accept are not only endurable to woman but are needful to her fullest enjoyment.  Make her position in church, State, marriage, your own; everywhere your equality ignored, everywhere made to feel another empowered by law and time-honored custom to prescribe the privileges to be enjoyed and the duties to be discharged by you; and then if you can imagine yourself to be content and happy, judge your mother and sisters and all women to be.

It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust.  It is the same with this woman’s revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, “All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

She wrote Lydia Mott:  “The new encyclopedia is just out and I notice in regard to Antoinette Brown Blackwell that it gives a full description of her work up to the time of her marriage, then says:  ’She married Samuel Blackwell and lives near New York.’  Not a word of the splendid work she has done on the platform and in the pulpit since.  Thus does every married woman sink her individuality.”  This brought from Lydia a spirited answer: