Page:A Few Hours in a Far Off Age.djvu/47

48 win them? These are some of the great world troubles your thoughtless shams bring upon human kind. You thereby strengthen man's injustice towards women, and while that continues no progress can take deep root. It should always be the aim of woman to rise from the degrading position assigned her in the age of bestial ignorance and brute power. To rise, by noble thought and act, until man, in very shame, yield her her fair share of world's advantages, which he continues to usurp, partly from ignorance and partly from little-mindedness, but always blindly as to the wrong he is working to the whole of the human species.

Away with your shams! Be no longer encouraged by cunning men to waste your energies on the absurd and injurious reduction of your waists, or the set of bows, &c. They do so to thus basely dwindle your nobility of nature, that you may become their weak-brained tools instead of their equals. This world is ours as much as men's. They have no greater right to it than we have. Oh, women! how can you sit inanely smiling over the fashion of a dress or other paltriness while man makes laws affecting you and your children—the dear children you are rearing with your blood—as he does over any other animal he possesses? His laws are that he may take your child from you, give it to strangers' care, rear it in rascality if it so suit his purposes, and finally will it from you. The husband cowardly enough to defame his wife can do so with impunity. Those other base curs who repeat his untruths are also able to gratify their dirty inclinations. You have no legal redress, wives! Man's laws are for his own safety and glorification in all matters. It was not many years since a law existed in England regulating the thickness of the stick with which a man might legally beat his wife. Our divorce records show