The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications of the law she writes: I do not know why I should have been so utterly overwhelmed by this proposal to execute a law passed by Christian legislators for the government of a Christian people, a law which had never been questioned by any nation or state or church, and was in full force all over the world. Why should the discovery of its existence curdle my blood, stop my heart-beats, and send a flush of burning shame from forehead to finger-tips? Why blame him for acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church? Was it any fault of his that “all that she (the wife) can acquire by her labor, service, or act during coverture belongs to the husband?” Certainly not! It occurred to me that all the advances made by humanity had been through the pressure of injustice, and that the screws had been turned on me that I might do something to right the great wrong which forbade married women to own property. So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny. I studied the laws under which I lived and began a series of letters on the subject of married women’s rights to hold property. The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would flow from granting property rights.