Cite: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4794467

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WOMAN'S RIGHTS AT ALBANY.

New York Tribune.

We see it announced with a chuckle in one of the most inveterately Hunker journals of our state that the Senate's select committee on the application and memorials in behalf of equal rights for woman have asked and ob- tained permission to report verbally—in other words, to be excused from setting forth any reasons for reporting that the prayer of the petitioners ought not to be granted. We com- mend the sagacity and discretion of this valiant committee. To answer the arguments of Mrs. Stanton's Address, or overthrow the positions   taken in the resolves of the late Woman's Rights Convention, even to their own satisfac- tion, would give a cold sweat to any com- mittee that could be constituted out of the pre- sent legislature. But to get up any morning just after the formal prayer has pretty thoroughly cleared the chamber, and merely state that the committee decide that the prayer of the petitioners ought not to be granted, and ask to be discharged from any further considera- tion of the subject—this, surely, need not tax too severely the mental fabric even of an average legislator of 1854. Should the Senate have any other job on hand which requires a report for which no reason can be given, we advise its reference to this same politic

committee.

Meantime, let us look at the case a little

more in detail.  

The memorialists address the Senate sub- stantially as follows :—

"Gentlemen,—You profess to be represen-   tatives of the whole people of New York, elected and paid to devise and adopt such measures as may be necessary to do justice to any portion of that people who may be op- pressed and without redress under existing laws. In behalf of one half of that people, who are   denied any direct voice in our legislation,

though subjected to taxation to enforce, and to     punishment for every breach of, the laws   which are made for them and not by them, we demand of you,

1. That the husband and wife whom your laws pronounce 'one flesh' shall have     equal rights in and power over their common property, so that the husband shall have no  

further legal power over the wife's patrimony than the wife has over the husband's, and so that the wife shall inherit the husband's pro-

perty in case of his death just so far as the

husband inherits the property of his deceased

wife.            

2. We demand that the mother of chil- dren born in lawful wedlock shall have as much legal control over them as the harlot or the victim of seduction has over her children —that it shall not be the legal right of the husband who wantonly or viciously deserts a faithful wife to rob her of the children whom she has nourished with her blood and whom she loves more than life; and that it shall no   longer be the legal right of a despotic or liber- tine husband to hold his wife in abject bond-

age to his tyranny and his vices by threatening to deprive her of her little ones.          

3. We demand that the right of the mother     to the guardianship and training of her deceased husband's children be legally recog- nised and upheld, so that she may not see them torn from her and confided to strangers by her husband's will, nor be deprived by law of the control of the family estate even when  

no adverse will has been made.

4. We ask that the property of a married   partnership without children shall not be

wrested from the widow in case of her hus-   band's death without a will, and she be turned into the street to subsist on the bare income of   one-third of it, while the residue goes to com-   paratlve strangers; but that whatever portion   is allotted her shall be hers for ever, just as the

husband would have inherited the wife's share   in perpetuity had she died before him.  

5. We ask that a poor, hard working   woman, cursed with a lazy, drunken husband, shall be legally enabled to receive and control her own earnings, and that the present abomi- nable legislation which enables the worthless, drunken brute who owns her to demand and receive all she has earned—nay, to sue her employer for it in case he shall have paid it over to her after due notice—be sent where it belongs."

—Such are some of the demands put forth in behalf of woman by a most respec- table convention of men and women assem- bled in Albany last month. What is the re-

sponse of the Senate? Blank silence, or the  

briefest possible negation. The advocates of   Democracy for Women as well as Men are not   deemed worth even a courteous refusal. They are merely kicked out of the chamber, like some hungry dog which had slipped in to

steal some honorable senator's dinner.

May not this be taken as a final answer to

the gentry who say, "Women don't need this   Right of Suffrage, because she is abundantly and most efficiently represented by her hus- band, father, brother. Every man is so re- lated to woman that he cannot fail to do her

justice at all times." Does his justice prove   different in kind from that which the master deals out to his slave, the jockey to his horse?

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