prevails, and the mothers are utterly powerless.

I doubt if there is, today, a State in this Union where a married woman
can sue or be sued for slander of character, and until recently there
was not one where she could sue or be sued for injury of person. However
damaging to the wife's reputation any slander may be, she is wholly
powerless to institute legal proceedings against her accuser unless her
husband shall join with her; and how often have we heard of the husband
conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good name of his
wife? A married woman can not testify in courts in cases of joint
interest with her husband.

A good farmer's wife in Illinois, who had all the rights she wanted, had
had made for herself a full set of false teeth. The dentist pronounced
them an admirable fit, and the wife declared it gave her fits to wear
them. The dentist sued the husband for his bill; his counsel brought the
wife as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand, saying, "A married
woman can not be a witness in matters of joint interest between herself
and her husband." Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your
mouths are a joint interest with your husbands, about which you are
legally incompetent to speak! If a married woman is injured by
accident, in nearly all of the States it is her husband who must sue,
and it is to him that the damages will be awarded. In Massachusetts a
married woman was severely injured by a defective sidewalk. Her husband
sued the corporation and recovered $13,000 damages, which belong to him
absolutely, and whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of that
money she must ask her husband for it; and if he be of a niggardly
nature, she will hear him say, every time, "What have you done with the
twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?" Isn't such a position
humiliating enough to be called "servitude?" That husband sued and
obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as
he would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse; and exactly as the
master, under the old regime, would have recovered for the services of
his slave.

I submit the question, if the deprivation by law of the ownership of
one's own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as
an individual to sue and be sued and testify in the courts, is not a
condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, even though under the
sacred name of marriage? Does any lawyer doubt my statemen