In some of the states, also, there have been laws passed giving to the mother a joint right with the father in the guardianship of the children.  But twenty years ago, when our woman’s rights movement commenced, by the laws of the State of New York, and all the states, the father had the sole custody and control of the children.  No matter if he were a brutal, drunken libertine, he had the legal right, without the mother’s consent, to apprentice her sons to rumsellers, or her daughters to brothel keepers.  He could even will away an unborn child, to some other person than the mother.  And in many of the states the law still prevails, and the mothers are still utterly powerless under the common law.

I doubt if there is, to-day, a State in this Union where a married woman can sue or be sued for slander of character, and until quite recently there was not one in which she could sue or be sued for injury of person.  However damaging to the wife’s reputation any slander may be, she is wholly powerless to institute legal proceedings against her accuser, unless her husband shall join with her; and how often have we heard of the husband conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good name of his wife?  A married woman cannot testify in courts in cases of joint interest with her husband.  A good farmer’s wife near Earlville, Ill., who had all the rights she wanted, went to a dentist of the village and had a full set of false teeth, both upper and under.  The dentist pronounced them an admirable fit, and the wife declared they gave her fits to wear them; that she could neither chew nor talk with them in her mouth.  The dentist sued the husband; his counsel brought the wife as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand, saying “a married woman cannot be a witness in matters of joint interest between herself and her husband.”  Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your mouths are joint interest with your husbands, about which you are legally incompetent to speak!!  If in our frequent and shocking railroad accidents a married woman is injured in her person, in nearly all of the States, it is her husband who must sue the company, and it is to her husband that the damages, if there are any, will be awarded.  In Ashfield, Mass., supposed to be the most advanced of any State in the Union in all things, humanitarian as well as intellectual, a married woman was severely injured by a defective sidewalk.  Her husband sued the corporation and recovered $13,000 damages.  And those $13,000 belong to him bona fide; and whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of it to supply her needs she must ask her husband for it; and if the man be of a narrow, selfish, niggardly nature, she will have to hear him say, every time, “What have you done, my dear, with the twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?” Isn’t such a position, I ask you, humiliating enough to be called “servitude?” That husband, as would any other husband, in nearly every State of this Union, sued and obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as the master, under the old slave regime, would have done, had his slave been thus injured, and precisely as he himself would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse instead of his wife.