Women -- Biography; Women -- Social and moral questions
At the present time the question of woman’s rights is being widely, and
in some quarters warmly, discussed. Our serial literature, both at home
and abroad, is claiming for woman freedom from all political, social,
and legal, disqualifications. That women have legal grievances of a
serious nature, cannot for a moment be questioned. How much longer will
seduction continue to go unpunished, except as a civil injury and by a
fictitious and costly suit! How much longer is woman to bear all the
consequences flowing from the sin of two souls, and to be goaded into
child-murder or suicide by the monstrous injustice of law! We punish
every crime save the wrong that is deepest and most cruel of all. Then
again, the absolute right of the husband to the property of his wife,
unless secured to her by special settlement, is both cruel and unjust
in its practical operation. Anything so injurious to woman ought
immediately to be erased from the statute-book. Yet with every
disposition to secure for woman all that she can wisely claim, we have
no sympathy with those who would draw her into public action in
opposition to man to whom she is so closely allied. Some time ago we
read that the Aylesbury magistrates had appointed Mrs. Sarah Wooster to
the office of overseer of the poor and surveyor of highways for the
parish of Illmire, and that during the previous year four women filled
similar offices in the Aylesbury district. As surely as a good
housewife would give her husband a Caudle curtain-lecture were he to
proffer his services in sweeping the floor, dressing the linen, or
cooking the dinner, so surely will a good husband cry out against and
turn with disgust from a wife who would invade his province. In the
sick-room, woman, by her quick perception, her instinctive decision,
and her tender sensibilities, may accomplish infinitely more for the
well-being of society, than man. For all the services of philanthropy
she is peculiarly fitted. The rights of woman do not obtain their due
measure of attention even in this country. Nothing but good could
possibly accrue from the full acknowledgment of her claims to be
educated as well as man is educated, and thus to be provided for the
many contingencies to which her sex is subject.
_BIOGRAPHY._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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