Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/489

446 While the following order reflects the spirit of the seventeenth century, the comments show the dawning of the right idea, and are worthy the time in which the great State of Pennsylvania could boast such women as Lucretia Mott, Anna E. Dickinson, Jane G. Swisshelm and Sarah J. Hale:

.—The mayor of Pittsburgh has ordered the arrest of every woman found on the streets alone after g o'clock in the evening; the consequence of which has been that some respectable ladies have recently seen the inside of the lock-up.—Exchange, June, 1869.

Now let the mothers, wives and daughters of Pittsburgh obtain the passage, by the city council, of an ordinance causing the arrest of every man found in the streets after 9 o'clock in the evening, and the law will then be equal in its operation. This legislating upon the behavior of one sex by the other exclusively, is one-sided and despotic. Give both sexes a chance at reforming each other.

Another step in progress was indicated by the assumption of some women to influence civil administration, not only for their own protection, but for that of their sires and sons:

An exchange says that women are becoming perfect nuisances, and to substantiate the assertion adds that 1,500 women in Chester county, Pennsylvania, have petitioned the court to grant no more liquor licenses.

Suppose wives should come reeling home, night after night, with curses on their lips, to destroy the food, the dishes, the furniture for which husbands toiled; to abuse trembling children, making the home, from year to year, a pandemonium on earth— would the good men properly be called "nuisances,' who should rise up and say this must end; we must protect our firesides, our children, ourselves, society at large? To have women even suggest such beneficent laws for the men of their families is called "a nuisance," while the whole barbarous code for women was declared by Lord Coke to be the "perfection of reason."

The prejudice against sex has been as bitter and unreasonable as against color, and far more reprehensible, because in too many cases it has been a contest between the inferior, with law on his side, and the superior, with law and custom against her, as the following facts in the Sunday Dispatch, by Anne E. McDowell, fully show:

The decision of the Court of Common Pleas in the case of Mrs. McManus, elected principal of the Mount Vernon Boys' Grammar School, is to the effect that, no rule being in existence prohibiting the exercise of the duties of such office by a woman, the resolution of the controllers against the exercise of the duties of that office by the lady was unjustifiable and illegal. Since the decision was pronounced the controllers have come up to the boundary of the principle held by the court, and a rule has been proposed that in future women shall be ineligible to be principals of boys' grammar schools—the case of Mrs. McManus being specially excepted. That lady, therefore, will be undisturbed. But she may be, like the celebrated "Lady Freemason." an exception to her sex. The controllers have not favored the public with their reasons