al, to sue and be sued, and to testify in the courts, is not a
condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, though under the sacred
name of marriage?

Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal status of married women?
I will remind him of the fact that the old common law of England
prevails in every State in this Union, except where the Legislature has
enacted special laws annulling it. And I am ashamed that not one State
has yet blotted from its statute books the old common law of marriage,
by which Blackstone, summed up in the fewest words possible, is made to
say, "husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband."

Thus may all married women, wives and widows, by the laws of the several
States, be technically included in the fifteenth amendment's
specification of "condition of servitude," present or previous. And not
only married women, but I will also prove to you that by all the great
fundamental principles of our free government, the entire womanhood of
the nation is in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our
revolutionary fathers, when they rebelled against old King George. Women
are taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried,
convicted and punished without a jury of their peers. And is all this
tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our
democratic-republican government to-day than it was to men under their
aristocratic, monarchical government one hundred years ago? There is not
an utterance of old John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds
a living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of
the nation. Bring to me a common-sense woman property holder, and I will
show you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every
time the tax-gatherer presents himself at her door. You will not find
one such but feels her condition of servitude as galling as did James
Otis when he said:

"The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not
represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most
essential rights, and if continued, seems to be in effect an entire
disfranchisement of every civil right. For, what one civil right is
worth a rush after a man's property is subject to be taken from him
at pleasure without his consent? If a man is not his own assessor
in person, or by deputy, his liberty is gone, or he is wholly at
the mercy of others."

What was