There is an old saying that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and I submit if the deprivation by law of the ownership of one’s own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as an individual, to sue and be sued, and to testify in the courts, is not a condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, though under the sacred name of marriage?

Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women?  I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England prevails in every State in this Union, except where the Legislature has enacted special laws annulling it.  And I am ashamed that not one State has yet blotted from its statute books the old common law of marriage, by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, is made to say, “husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband.”

Thus may all married women, wives and widows, by the laws of the several States, be technically included in the fifteenth amendment’s specification of “condition of servitude,” present or previous.  And not only married women, but I will also prove to you that by all the great fundamental principles of our free government, the entire womanhood of the nation is in a “condition of servitude” as surely as were our revolutionary fathers, when they rebelled against old King George.  Women are taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried, convicted and punished without a jury of their peers.  And is all this tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our democratic-republican government to-day than it was to men under their aristocratic, monarchical government one hundred years ago?  There is not an utterance of old John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds a living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the nation.  Bring to me a common-sense woman property holder, and I will show you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every time the tax-gatherer presents himself at her door.  You will not find one such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James Otis when he said: 

“The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right.  For, what one civil right is worth a rush after a man’s property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his consent?  If a man is not his own assessor in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is wholly at the mercy of others.”

What was the three-penny tax on tea, or the paltry tax on paper and sugar to which our revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with the taxation of the women of this Republic?  The orphaned Pixley sisters, six dollars a day, and even the women, who are proclaiming the tyranny of our taxation without representation, from city to city throughout the country, are often compelled to pay a tax for the poor privilege of defending our rights.  And again, to show that disfranchisement was precisely the slavery of which the fathers complained, allow me to cite to you old Ben.  Franklin, who in those olden times was admitted to be good authority, not merely in domestic economy, but in political as well; he said: