Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/438

438 general agitation in different localities on several vital questions in the preceding year:

First—On taxation. Women being large property holders, had felt the pressure during the war, especially of the tax on incomes, and had resolved on resistance: Accordingly, large meetings were called at various points, in 1868. While women of wealth were organizing to resist taxation, the working women were uniting to defend their earnings, and secure better wages. It seemed for a few months as if they were in a chronic condition of rebellion. But after many vain struggles for redress in the iron teeth of the law, and equally vain appeals to have unjust laws amended, the women learned the hopelessness of all efforts made by disfranchised classes.

Second—On prostitution. For the first time in the history of the government, a bill was presented in the New York legislature, in 1868, proposing to license prostitution. This showed the degradation of woman's position as no other act of legislation could have done, and although the editors of The Revolution were the only women who publicly opposed the bill (which they did both before the committee of the legislature, and in their journal), yet there was in the minds of many, a deep undercurrent of resistance to the odious provisions of that bill. Horace Greeley, too, in his editorials in the New York Tribune, denounced the proposition in such unmeasured terms that, although pressed at three different legislative sessions, no member of the committee could be found with sufficient moral hardihood to present the bill.

In connection with this question, the necessity of "women as police," was for some time a topic of discussion. They had