When Dr. Johnson had published his English Dictionary, and was asked by a
lady how he chanced to make a certain mistake that she pointed out, he
answered, "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance." I always feel disposed to
make the same comment on the assertion of any woman that she has all the
rights she wants. For every woman is, or may be, or might have been, a
mother. And when she comes to know that even now, in many parts of the
Union, a married mother has no legal right to her child, I should think her
tongue would cleave to her mouth before she would utter those foolish words
again.
All the things I ever heard or read against slavery did not fix in my soul
such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave-jail many
years ago. As I sat there, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait
on his wife. Three little sisters were brought in, from eight to twelve
years old: they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had
evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean
and whole. The gentleman chose one of them, and then asked her,
good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him. She burst into
tears, and said, "I want to stay with my mother." But her tears were as
powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean.
That was all. But all the horrors of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," the stories told
me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens among
colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail. The
whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child
passed before me in fancy. It seemed to me that a man must be utterly lost
to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a
system. It seemed to me that the woman who could tolerate, much less defend
it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and
grossly ignorant.
You acquiesce, fair lady. You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank God!
it is past. Past? Is it so? Past, if you please, as to the law of slavery,
but as to the legal position of woman still a fearful reality. It is not
many years since a scene took place in a Boston court-room, before Chief
Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this respect, than that scene in St.
Louis, inasmuch as the mother was present when the child was taken away,
and the wrong was sanctioned by the highest judicial officer of the State.
Two little girls, who had been taken from their mother by their guardian,
their father being dead, had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and
he brought them into court under a writ of habeas corpus, and the court
awarded them to him as against their mother. "The little ones were very
much affected," says the "Boston Herald," "by the result of the decision
which separated them from their mother; and force was required to remove
them from the court-room. The distress of the mother was also very
evident."
There must have been some special reason, you say, for such a seeming
outrage: she was a bad woman. No: she was "a lady of the highest
respectability." No charge was made against her; but, being left a widow,
she had married again; and for that, and that only, so far as appears, the
court took from her the guardianship of her own children,--bone of her
bone, and flesh of her flesh, the children for whom she had borne the
deepest physical agony of womanhood,--and awarded them to somebody else.
You say, "But her second husband might have misused the children." Might?
So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to protect them.
Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a half-dozen
successive marriages, have brought stepmother after stepmother to control
these children, and no court could have interfered. The father is
recognized before the law as the natural guardian of the children. The
mother, even though she be left a widow, is not. The consequence is a
series of outrages of which only a few scattered instances come before the
public; just as in slavery, out of a hundred little girls sold away from
their parents, only one case might ever be mentioned in any newspaper.
This case led to an alteration of the law in Massachusetts, but the same
thing might yet happen in some States of the Union. The possibility of a
single such occurrence shows that there is still a fundamental wrong in the
legal position of woman. And the fact that most women do not know it only
deepens the wrong--as Dr. Channing said of the contentment of the Southern
slaves. The mass of men, even of lawyers, pass by such things, as they
formerly passed by the facts of slavery.
There is no lasting remedy for these wrongs, except to give woman the
political power to protect herself. There never yet existed a race, nor a
class, nor a sex, which was noble enough to be trusted with political power
over another sex, or class, or race. It is for self-defence that woman
needs the ballot. And in view of a single such occurrence as I have given,
I charge that woman who professes to have "all the rights she wants,"
either with a want of all feeling of motherhood, or with "ignorance, madam,
pure ignorance."