Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/608

580 women engaged in this movement ask that the wife shall be made heir to the husband to the same extent that he is now her heir.

Taxation without representation is another of the wrongs that woman endures. In this she is held below the negro in the political scale; for the black man, when not possessing property to the extent of two hundred and fifty dollars, is not allowed to vote, but neither is he taxed. The present law of divorce is very unjust; the husband, whether the innocent or the guilty party, retaining all the wife's property, as also the control of the children unless by special decree of the court they are assigned to the mother.

Rev. said: The wife owes service and labor to her husband as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master. This grates harshly upon the ears of Christendom; but it is made palpably and practically true all through our statute books, despite the poetic fancy which views woman as elevated in the social estate; but a little lower than the angels.

Letters were read from Paulina Wright Davis, Dr. Trail, Mary C. Vaughan, and Hon. William Hay. A series of fourteen resolutions were presented by Mr. Channing, and discussed, which suggested the appointment of various committees. One to prepare an address to the Legislature, and to ask a special hearing before a joint committee to consider the whole subject of the just and equal rights of woman; another to prepare an address to the capitalists and industrialists of New York on the best modes of employing and remunerating women.

Resolved, That the movement, now in progress throughout the United States, for securing the just and equal rights of women, in education, industry, law, politics, religion, and social life, is timely, wise, and practical; that it is authorized by all the essential principles of Republican institutions, and sanctioned by the spirit of the Christian religion; and finally that it is but a carrying on to completeness of a reform, already begun, by legal provisions, in the most advanced States of the Union.

Resolved, That the design of all true legislation should be the elevation of every member of the community—and that the violation of this legitimate design, in depriving woman of her just and equal rights, is not only highly injurious to her, but by reason of the equilibrium which pervades all existence, that man, too, is impeded in his progress by the very chains which bind woman to the lifeless skeleton of feudal civilization.

Resolved, That we do not ask for woman's political, civil, industrial, and social equality with man, in the spirit of antagonism, or with a wish to produce separate and conflicting interests between the sexes, but because the onward progress of society and the highest aspirations of the human race, demand that woman should everywhere be recognized as the co-equal and co-sovereign of man.