ys when
the women had given their sympathy and began to demand some in
return, it was found out that they were very "dependent"
creatures, and that, if they persisted in it, they would forfeit
the "protection" of the men; and this in the face of the fact,
that when politicians wanted votes and clergymen wanted money,
their invariable practice was to appeal to the women!

The last time he had considered woman's rights he was in a place
where man's rights needed to be defended--it was in Kansas. No
man could go to Kansas and see what woman had done there, and
come back and see the little men who squeak and shout on
platforms in behalf of Kansas, and then turn to deride and
despise women, without a feeling of disgust. He would like to
place some of these parlor orators and dainty platform speakers
where the women of Kansas had stood, and suffered, and acted. He
saw, while in Kansas, a New York woman[151]--whose story they
might remember in the newspapers--how she hospitably prepared, in
one day, three dinners for the marauders who were hovering around
her house, and in their starvation became respectful at last, and
asked her for the hospitality they did not then quite dare to
enforce; and how they ate her dinner and abused her husband,
until the good woman could stand it no longer, and at last opened
her lips and gave them a piece of her mind. He saw that woman.
She had lived for weeks together in the second story of a log
hut, with the windows of the lower story boarded up, so that the
inmates had to climb in by a ladder. She was surrounded by
pro-slavery camps; and while her husband was in the army, she was
left alone. The house had been visited again and again, and
plundered. The wretches would come at night, discharge their
rifles, and howl like demons. Her little girl, a nervous child,
had sickened and died from sheer fright. But still, after the
death of that child, the mother lived on, and still gave
hospitality to free-soil men, and still defended the property of
her husband by her presence. At last the marauders burned her
house over her head, and she retreated for a time. The speaker
saw her when she was on her way back to that homestead, to
rebuild the house which she had seen once reduced to ashes by the
enemy; and she said tha