Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/363

Rh tirely. Parties already married may contract to surrender their present rights for those secured by this statute, such contracts to be recorded in the probate court.

Thus we have a new and clear statute framed in accordance with a simple principle of reform, for which the Republican has long done battle—the equality of married persons in their rights and responsibilities of property. The adoption of the reform is due deeply to the general agitation of the rights of women, the efforts of Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, the Smith girls' cows, and perhaps some flagrant instance of injustice to rich wives by tyrant husbands near the capital. But the great occasion and immediate cause, without which this generation might have pleaded for it in vain, was the perception of the justice of it by Governor Hubbard, and his open advocacy of it in his message. Lawyers have one answer for all reforms regarding property or civil contracts—they are impossible. But here was undeniably the best lawyer in the State who said, and threw the weight of his first State paper on the proposition, that this thing was possible, and, if he said it was possible, there was no man who could gainsay it. The legislature took the reform on its own sense of justice and on the assurance of Richard D. Hubbard, that it would work.

On June 6, 1870, at a second hearing before the Joint Committee on Woman Suffrage, in the capitol at New Haven, Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford of the Universalist church, Mrs. Benchley and Mrs. Russell were the speakers. During that session of the legislature Mrs. Hanaford acted as chaplain both in the Senate and House of Representatives, and received a check for her services which she valued chiefly as a recognition of woman's equality in the clerical profession.

Mrs. Hooker was ably sustained in her new position by her husband, a prominent lawyer of the State. Being equally familiar with civil and canon law, with Blackstone and the Bible, he was well equipped to meet the opponents of the reform at every point. While Mrs. Hooker held meetings in churches and school-houses through the State, her husband in his leisure hours sent the daily press articles on the subject. And thus their united efforts stirred the people to thought and at last roused a Democratic governor of the State to his duty on this question. From the many able tracts issued and articles published in the journals we give a few extracts. In answer to the common objections of "free love" and "easy divorce," in the Evening Post of January 17, 1871, Mr. Hooker said:

The persons who advocate easy divorce would advocate it just as strongly if there was no woman suffrage movement. The two have no necessary connection. Indeed one of the strongest arguments in favor of woman suffrage is, that the marriage relation will be safer with women to vote and legislate upon it than where the voting and legislation are left wholly to the men. Women will always be wives and mothers, above all things else. This law of nature cannot be changed, and I know of nobody