Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/809

736 , Wyoming, April 4, 1870.

Mrs. Myra Bradwell, Chicago, Ill.:


 * I am in receipt of your favor of March 26, in which you request me to "give you a truthful statement, over my own signature, for publication in your paper, of the history of, and my observations in regard to, women as grand and petit jurors in Wyoming." I will comply with your request, with this qualification, that it be not published over my own signature, as I do not covet newspaper publicity, and have already, without any agency or fault of my own, been subjected to an amount of it which I never anticipated nor conceived of, and which has been far from agreeable to me.

I had no agency in the enactment of the law in Wyoming conferring legal equality upon women. I found it upon the statute-book of that territory, and in accordance with its provisions several women were legally drawn by the proper officers on the grand and petit juries of Albany county, and were duly summoned by the sheriff without any agency of mine. On being apprised of these facts, I conceived it to be my plain duty to fairly enforce this law, as I would any other; and more than this, I resolved at once that, as it had fallen to my lot to have the experiment tried under my administration, it should have a fair trial, and I therefore assured these women that they could serve or not, as they chose; that if they chose to serve, the Court would secure to them the most respectful consideration and deference, and protect them from insult in word or gesture, and from everything which might offend a modest and virtuous woman in any of the walks of life in which the good and true women of our country have been accustomed to move.

While I had never been an advocate for the law, I felt that thousands of good men and women had been, and that they had a right to see it fairly administered; and I was resolved that it should not be sneered down if I had to employ the whole power of the court to prevent it. I felt that even those who were opposed to the policy of admitting women to the right of suffrage and to hold office would condemn me if I did not do this. It was also sufficient for me that my own judgment approved this course.

With such assurances these women chose to serve and were duly impanelled as jurors. They were educated, cultivated eastern ladies, who are an honor to their sex. They have, with true womanly devotion, left their homes of comfort in the States to share the fortunes of their husbands and brothers in the far West and to aid them in founding a new State beyond the Missouri.

And now as to the results. With all my prejudices against the policy, I am under conscientious obligations to say that these women acquitted themselves with such dignity, decorum, propriety of conduct and intelligence as to win the admiration of every fair-minded citizen of Wyoming. They were careful, pains-taking, intelligent and conscientious. They were firm and resolute for the right as established by the law and the testimony. Their verdicts were right, and, after three or four criminal trials, the lawyers engaged in defending persons accused of crime began to avail themselves of the right of peremptory challenge to get rid of the female jurors, who were too much in favor of enforcing the laws and punishing crime to suit the interests of their clients. After the grand jury had been in session two days, the dance-house keepers, gamblers and demi-monde fled out of the city in dismay, to escape the indictment of women grand jurors! In short I have never, in twenty-five years of constant experience in the courts of the country, seen more faithful, intelligent and resolutely honest grand and petit juries than these.

A contemptibly lying and silly dispatch went over the wires to the effect that during the trial of A. W. Howie for homicide (in which the jury consisted of six women and six men) the men and women were kept locked up together all night for four nights. Only two nights intervened during the trial, and on these nights, by my order, the jury was taken to the parlor of the large, commodious and well-furnished hotel of the Union Pacific Railroad, in charge of the sheriff and a woman bailiff, where they were supplied with meals and every comfort, and at 10 o'clock the women were conducted by the bailiff to a large and suitable apartment where beds were prepared for them,