Woman, Church & State

580

When reading was first taught women in America, said Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, it was opposed on the ground that she would forget her father’s or husband’s name should she learn to read and write. Geography met with like opposition on the ground of its tendency to make her dissatisfied with home and desirous to travel, while the records of history show that the first public examination of women in Geometry, 1829, raised a cry of disapproval over the whole country.

581

There are hard and ugly facts in this Christendom of ours, and its history includes the serfdom and nihilism of Russia, the drudgery of German women; the wrongs of the Irish peasant girl; the 20,000 little English girls sold each year to gratify the lusts of the aristocracy; all the horrors of the Inquisition; all the burnings of the witches; the slavery and polygamy of America and the thousand iniquities all around us; all these belong to the history of Christendom. —The Woman’s Tribune, Clara Colby, editor.

582

This case decided adversely to woman’s right of suffrage by the territorial Supreme Court, was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, through the efforts of Mr. A. S. Austin, a young and energetic attorney of Olympia, the state capital; the points raised by Mr. Austin were, First: that the Bloomer case is a collusive one between the original plaintiff and defendants, and is a fraud upon all friends of equal suffrage in the state. Second: that the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington Territory was erroneous in two respects, to wit: that the statute of the territory conferring suffrage was constitutional, and that women are citizens.

583

At a Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.

584

This was the case at the Republican nominating convention, Chicago, 1880.

585

The liberty and civilization of the present are nothing else than the fragments of rights which the scaffold and stake have wrung from the strong hands of the usurpers. —Wendell Phillips.