Again. Adultery alone on the part of a wife was quite sufficient ground for a divorce in favour of the husband, but a wife must have a husband who, in addition to being persistently and openly unfaithful, cruelly ill-treated her, and took a cowardly advantage of the superiority of strength he had attained through having systematically deprived woman of every health-giving recreation, before the law, made by men for the benefit of men, would afford her relief from her daily tortures. It is on record that a judge, when a woman was being tried for the presumed murder of her husband, dwelt with such horror upon the most dreadful fact that she had been unfaithful to her husband, and proved so conclusively that a woman who could be unfaithful was capable of every crime under the sun, that the jury, remembering that their interests as husbands must be protected, sentenced the woman to be hanged, although medical witnesses showed that she could not be a murderess, seeing that the cause of her husband’s death was a drug of which he was proved to have been a systematic partaker. From this it will be argued that purity of living held high rank with the English. But this was by no means the case, for in the same decade the rebellion and protests of women were naturally aroused by the foulest and most disgusting legislation that ever disgraced the land. This was the State regulation of vice, whereby the most respectable women were liable to be subjected to brutal indignities, in order that no precaution might be neglected which would ensure for men complete immunity from the consequences of systematic libertinism and immorality. This may sound paradoxical, but it is not the less sickening in its shameful reality, and serves to show the hollowness and insincerity of masculine legislators. It is small wonder that these and other crying evils brought forth the fruits they did. Systematic injustice roused the antipathy of women who, besides having sense enough to argue their own case, had sufficient moral courage to brave the animadversion which was levelled at them by the arrogant idiots of the one sex, and the unreasoning imbeciles of the other. Hence the expressions which we come across at times, which to modern New Amazonians unacquainted with history are unintelligible, but which had their own bitter meaning at the time they were in use. “Bluestocking” was a term of opprobrium levelled at women who strove to improve their moral and intellectual status by means of study. A “Woman’s Rights’ Advocate” was described as an individual who was the fit butt for the laughter and derision of the rest of the community.