When Marriage Meant BondageBy Lucy Stone(Probably the most brilliant and effective of the early woman suffrage orators. Is said to have possessed a beautiful speaking voice, and great personal charm. The founder, with her husband, Henry Blackwell, of “The Woman’s Journal.” From “Susan B. Anthony, Her Life and Work.”)
By Lucy Stone
(Probably the most brilliant and effective of the early woman suffrage orators. Is said to have possessed a beautiful speaking voice, and great personal charm. The founder, with her husband, Henry Blackwell, of “The Woman’s Journal.” From “Susan B. Anthony, Her Life and Work.”)
The common law, which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is modified only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the “custody” of thewife’s person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property which he may will away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states, married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will; so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases.