the discussion spread through the press of the State,
finding able defenders as well as bitter opponents. A peculiar
illustration of the uncertain disposition of an audience was here
given. While in other places women had been prevented from speaking,
now they would not hear any but women, and whenever Mr. Channing or Mr.
May attempted to speak he was at once cried down in a good-natured but
effective manner. The women were greatly distressed at this, as these
men had been their strongest allies, their leaders, their educators;
but their appeals to the audience to listen to masculine eloquence were
made in vain.

The petitions with their 10,000 names were presented in the Assembly,
and strongly advocated by Mr. Peters, and Mr. D. P. Wood, of Onondaga
county, but vehemently opposed by Mr. Burnett, of Essex. In his speech
against the petition asking only that married women might possess their
own wages and have equal guardianship of their children, he said:

I hope before even this motion is put, gentlemen will be allowed to
reflect upon the important question whether these individuals
deserve any consideration at the hands of the Legislature. Whatever
may be their pretensions or their sincerity, they do not appear
satisfied with having unsexed themselves, but they desire to unsex
every female in the land and to set the whole community ablaze with
unhallowed fire. I trust, sir, the House may deliberate before we
suffer them to cast their firebrand into our midst. True, as yet,
there is nothing officially before us, but it is well known that
the object of these unsexed women is to overthrow the most sacred
of our institutions, to set at defiance the divine law which
declares man and wife to be one, and establish on its ruins what
will be in fact and in principle but a species of legalized
adultery.

It is, therefore, a matter of duty, a duty to ourselves, to our
consciences, to our constituents and to God, who is the source of
all law and of all obligations, to reflect long and deliberately
before we shall even seem to countenance a movement so unholy as
this. Are we, sir, to give the least countenance to claims so
preposterous, disgraceful and criminal as are embodied in this
address? Are we to put the stamp of truth upon the libel here set
forth, that men and women in the matrimonial relation are to be
equal? We know that God