It is not strange then, that, half in jest, half in earnest, the wife of John Adams wrote to him in 1776 to ask if it "were generous in American men to claim absolute power over wives at a moment when they were emancipating the whole earth." Nor was it strange, that, in a more serious mood, Hannah Corbin of Virginia should write to her brother, Richard Henry Lee, on the same subject.
The American Colonies were struggling against the mother-country, on the ground that taxation and representation should be inseparable.
The "National Intelligencer" has to confess, when it tells the story, that it was not strange if "strong-minded" women of that era, finding themselves taxed, should wonder why they could not vote.
Mr. Lee wrote from Chantilly in reply, March 17, 1778:—
"I do not see," he says, "that any thing prevents widows, having large property, from voting, notwithstanding it has never been the case either here or in England. Perhaps it was thought unbecoming for women to press into tumultuous assemblies.... Perhaps it was thought, that, as all those who vote for taxes must bear the tax, none would be imposed, except for the public good.
"For both the widow and the single woman," he continues, "I have the highest respect; and would, at any time, give my consent to secure to them the franchise, though I do not think it would increase their security.
"The Committee of Taxation," he adds, "are regularly chosen by the freeholders and housekeepers; and, in the choice of them, you have as legal a right to vote as any person."
Mr. Lee thinks, that, in a few minutes' conversation, he could "content" his sister upon the subject; but eighty years have passed away, and the question is still unsettled.
What he calls a "woman's security" is proved to be no security, even in the small matter of money; for men are constantly imposing taxes, the burden of which they are never to bear. As I have shown, in treating of labor, what position women hold toward the State in the matter of employment, I will not repeat the statement here. Let these pages bear no other burden than that of woman's civil rights,—"woman's rights,"—a phrase which we all hate; which soils the lips that use it; which women speak with such unction as a slave might clank his chains!
Soil the lips? Not because it is a phrase which stirs the ridicule and the contempt of the weak-minded; not because you consider it only the second term of the Bloomer equation: but because the necessity to use it shows how little has yet been done; shows that men still dwell on distinctions of sex, in preference to identities of duty; that women are play-things still in the popular estimate,—creatures of the nursery and the drawing-room, but not angels of God, joint-heirs of immortality.