t of the legal
status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the common
law of England prevails in every State but two in this Union, except
where the legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. I am
ashamed that not one of the States yet has blotted from its statute
books the old law of marriage, which, summed up in the fewest words
possible, is in effect "husband and wife are one, and that one the
husband."

Thus may all married women 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. The
facts also prove that, by all the great fundamental principles of our
free government, not only married women but the entire womanhood of the
nation are in a "condition of servitude" as surely as were our
Revolutionary fathers when they rebelled against King George. Women are
taxed without representation, governed without their consent, tried,
convicted and punished without a jury of their peers. Is all this
tyranny any less humiliating and degrading to women under our
democratic-republican government today than it was to men under their
aristocratic, monarchial government one hundred years ago? There is not
an utterance of John Adams, John Hancock or Patrick Henry, but finds a
living response in the soul of every intelligent, patriotic woman of the
nation. Show me a justice-loving woman property-holder, and I will show
you one whose soul is fired with all the indignation of 1776 every time
the tax-collector 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, for he is wholly at
the mercy of others.

What was the three-penny tax on tea or the paltry tax on paper and sugar
to which our Revolutionary fathers were subjected, when compared with
the taxation of the women of this republic? And again, to show that
disfranchisement was precisely the sla