Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/911

822 last legislature gave a respectful hearing to several ladies on the question, The property rights of married women are in a crude state; the wife's personal property vests in the husband; the profits and rents that accrue from her real estate belong to him also. She can make no will without the assent of her husband, and if given, he can revoke it at any time before the will is probated. The wife's wages belong to her husband. She cannot sue or be sued without he joins her in the suit. The wife's dower is a life interest in a third of the husband's real estate, whereas the husband's curtesy, where there is issue of the marriage, born alive, is a life interest in all the real estate belonging to the wife at the time of her death. This is the statutory law, but the wife by obtaining a decree in chancery may possess all the rights of a femme sole. A bill securing more equal rights to women passed the House of the last legislature, but failed in the Senate. The courtesy of Kentucky men to women in general, has kept them from realizing their civil and political degradation, until, by some sudden turn in the wheel of fortune, the individual woman has felt the iron teeth of the law in her own flesh, and warned her slumbering sisterhood. We are now awaking to the fact that an aristocracy of sex in a republic is as inconsistent and odious as an aristocracy of color, and indeed far more so.

We are indebted to Mrs. Elizabeth Lisle Saxon for the following:

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether is the chief representative of liberal thought in Tennessee. Her pen is ever ready to champion the wronged. I first came to know her when engaged in a newspaper discussion to reëstablish in the public schools of Memphis three young women who had been dismissed because of "holding too many of Mrs. Meriwether's views" —the reason actually given by the superintendent and endorsed by the board of directors. A seven month's war was carried on, ending in a triumphant reinstallment of the teachers, a new superintendent, and a new board of directors. Public opinion was educated into more liberal ideas, and the Memphis Appeal, through its chivalrous editor, Mr. Keating, declared squarely for woman suffrage.

When Col. Kerr introduced into the Tennessee legislature a bill making divorce impossible for any cause save adultery, Mrs. Meriwether wrote the ablest article I] ever read, in opposition, which Mr, Keating published in his paper, and distributed among the members of the legislature. The result was a clear vote against the bill.

With Mrs. Lide Meriwether and Mrs. M. J. Holmes, she publicly assailed the cross examination of women in criminal trials, either as culprits or witnesses, until the practice was broken up, and private hearings accorded. In 1876 she sent a memorial to the National Democratic convention at St. Louis, asking that party to declare for woman suffrage in its platform. Though her appeal was not read, hundreds of copies were circulated among the members in the hope of stirring thought on the subject in the South. It provoked much sarcasm because it was signed only by Mrs. Meriwether and Mrs. Saxon. In 1880-81 Mrs. Meriwether was one of the speakers in the series of conventions held by the National association in the Western and New England States.