en.

[Examples given to prove this point.]

In a western city the wives conspired to burn down a house of ill-fame
in which their husbands had placed a half-dozen of the demi-monde. Would
it not have shown much more womanly wisdom and virtue for those legal
wives to have refused to recognize their husbands, instead of wreaking
their vengeance on the heads of those wretched women? But how could they
without finding themselves, as a result, penniless and homeless? The
person, the services, the children, the subsistence, of each and every
one of those women belonged by law, not to herself, but to her
unfaithful husband.

Now, why is it that man can hold woman to this high code of morals, like
Caesar's wife--not only pure but above suspicion--and so surely and
severely punish her for every departure, while she is so helpless, so
powerless to check him in his license, or to extricate herself from his
presence and control? His power grows out of his right over her
subsistence. Her lack of power grows out of her dependence on him for
her food, her clothes, her shelter.

Marriage never will cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the
law recognizes the equal ownership in the joint earnings and
possessions. The true relation of the sexes never can be attained until
woman is free and equal with man. Neither in the making nor executing of
the laws regulating these relations has woman ever had the slightest
voice. The statutes for marriage and divorce, for adultery, breach of
promise, seduction, rape, bigamy, abortion, infanticide--all were made
by men. They, alone, decide who are guilty of violating these laws and
what shall be their punishment, with judge, jury and advocate all men,
with no woman's voice heard in our courts, save as accused or witness,
and in many cases the married woman is denied the poor privilege of
testifying as to her own guilt or innocence of the crime charged against
her.

Since the days of Moses and the prophets, men and ministers have
preached the law of "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children and the children's children, to the third and fourth
generations." But with absolute power over woman and all the conditions
of life for the whole 6,000 years, man has proved his utter inability
either to put away his own iniquities, or to cease to hand them down
from generation to generation; hence, the only hope of reform is in
sharing this absolute power with some other than him