The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and lawDall, Caroline Wells Healey
History
The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey
Women -- Education; Women -- Employment; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc.
I have been anxious to have positive proof of my conjecture in regard to
the authorship of the "Lawe's Resolution of the Rights of Women;" but
persevering endeavors in England, in several directions, have only left
the matter as it stands in the text. It would be very interesting to
know something of the private history of the man who wrote that book.
In the first of the following lectures, I have ventured a rhetorical
allusion to the blue-laws of Connecticut. Since it went to press, I have
seen it stated, on high authority, that any American writer who should
"profess to believe in the existence of the blue-laws of New Haven would
simply proclaim himself a dunce;" and the "Saturday Review" has been
handled without gloves for taking this existence for granted.
I never supposed that the term "blue" applied to the color of the paper
on which such laws were printed, any more than I supposed "blue
Presbyterianism" referred to the color of the presbyters' gowns. I
supposed it was the outgrowth of a popular sarcasm, descriptive, not of
a "veritable code," nor of a "practical code unpublished," but of such
portions of the general code as were repugnant to common sense, and the
genial nature of man. This I still think will be found to be the case;
and it is certainly to Connecticut divines and Connecticut newspapers
that we owe the popular impression.
It was in the forty-sixth year of the independence of the United States
that S. Andrus & Co., of Hartford, published a volume purporting to be a
compendium of early judicial proceedings in Connecticut, and especially
of that portion of the proceedings of the Colony of New Haven commonly
called the "blue-laws." Charles A. Ingersoll, Esq., testified to the
correctness of these copies of the ancient record.
As I quote this title wholly from memory, I am unable to say whether the
colony ever fined a bishop for kissing his own wife on Sunday; but I
have read more than once of such fines; and, if no laws remain
unrepealed on the Connecticut statute-book quite as absurd in their
spirit and general tendency, there are many on those of Massachusetts
and New Hampshire: so I shall let my rhetorical flourish stand.
To my English friends, to Mr. Herndon of Illinois, Mr. Higginson, and
Samuel F. Haven, Esq., of Worcester, I owe my usual acknowledgments for
books lent, and service proffered, with a generosity and graceful
readiness cheering to remember.
Nor will I omit, in what may be a last opportunity, to bear faithful
testimony to the assistance rendered, in all my studies of this sort, by
my friend, Mr. John Patton, of Montreal. No single person has helped me
so much, so wisely, or so well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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