There is an old saying that "a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet," and I submit if the deprivation by law of the ownership of one's
own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as an
individual, to sue and be sued, and to testify in the courts, is not a
condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, though under the sacred
name of marriage?
Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women?
I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England
prevails in every State in this Union, except where the Legislature has
enacted special laws annulling it. And I am ashamed that not one State
has yet blotted from its statute books the old common law of marriage,
by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, is made to
say, "husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband."
Thus may all married women, wives and widows, by the laws of the several
States, be technically included in the fifteenth amendment's
specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous. And not
only married women, but I will also prove to you that by all the great
fundamental principles of our free government, the entire womanhood of
the nation is in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our
revolutionary fathers, when they rebelled against old King George.
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