Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No, no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed. We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human beings for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul, we see the need of courage, judgment and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man.... With the earnest persuasiveness for which she had been noted nearly half a century, Lucy Stone (Mass.) said: I come before this committee with the sense which I always feel, that we are handicapped as women in what we try to do for ourselves by the single fact that we have no vote. This cheapens us. You do not care so much for us as if we had votes, so that we come always with that infinite disadvantage. But the thing I want to say particularly is that we have our immortal Declaration of Independence and the various bills of rights of the different States (George Washington advised us to recur often to first principles), and in these nothing is clearer than the basis of the claim that women should have equal rights with men. A complete government is a perfectly just government.... What I desire particularly to impress upon this committee is the gross and grave injustice of holding thirty millions of women absolutely helpless under the Government. The laws touch us at every point. From the time the girl baby is born until the time the aged woman makes her last will and testament, there is not one of her affairs which the law does not control. It says who shall own the property, and what rights the woman shall have; it settles all her affairs, whether she shall buy or sell or will or deed.... Persons are elected by men to represent them in Congress and the State Legislatures, and here are these millions of women, with just the same stake in the Government that men have, with a class interest of their own, and with not one solitary word to say or power to help settle any of the things which concern them.