“Trifling as is this testimonial in itself, they feel that if you knew the genuine appreciation of you and your work that goes with it—the gratitude with which each one regards you as a faithful worker for women—you would not consider it unworthy your acceptance. With best wishes for your continued health, which in your case means continued usefulness,
“I am, dear Madam,
“With great respect and esteem,
“Your obedient Servant,
“Celia Burleigh,
“Cor. Sec. Sorosis.
“37, Huntingdon Street, Brooklyn, New York,
“June 21st, 1869.”
The part of my work for women, however, to which I look back with most satisfaction was that in which I laboured to obtain protection for unhappy wives, beaten, mangled, mutilated or trampled on by brutal husbands. One day in 1878 I was by chance reading a newspaper in which a whole series of frightful cases of this kind were recorded, here and there, among the ordinary news of the time. I got up out of my armchair, half dazed, and said to myself: “I will never rest till I have tried what I can do to stop this.”
I thought anxiously what was the sort of remedy I ought to endeavour to put forward. A Parliamentary Blue Book had been printed in 1875 entitled: “Reports on the State of the law relating to Brutal Assaults,” and the following is a summary of the results. There was a large consensus of opinion that the law as it now stands is insufficient for its purpose. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Mr. Justice Lush, Mr. Justice Mellor, Chief Baron Kelly, Barons Bramwell, Pigott and Pollock, all expressed the same judgment (pp. 7–19). The following gave their opinion in favour of flogging offenders in cases of brutal assaults. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Mr. Justices Blackburn, Mellor, Lush, Quain, Archibald, Brett, Grove, Chief Baron Kelly, Barons Bramwell, Pigott, Pollock, Charles, and Amphlett. Only Lord Coleridge and Lord Denman hesitated, and Mr. Justice Keating opposed flogging. Of Chairmen of Quarter Sessions 64 (out of 68, whose answers were sent to the Home Office,) and the Recorders of 41 towns, were in favour of flogging. After all this testimony of the opinions of experts (collected of course at the public expense), three years elapsed during which absolutely nothing was done to make any practical use of it! During the interval, scores of Bills, interesting to the represented sex, passed through Parliament; but this question on which the lives of women literally hung, was never mooted! Something like 5,000 women, judging by the published judicial statistics, were in those years “brutally assaulted;” i.e., not merely struck, but maimed, blinded, burned, trampled on by strong men in heavy shoes, and, in many cases, murdered outright; and thousands of children were brought up to witness scenes which (as Colonel Leigh said) “infernalise a whole generation.” Where lay the fault? Scarcely with the Government, or even with Parliament, but with the simple fact that, under our present constitution, Women, having no votes, can only exceptionally and through favour, bring pressure to bear to force attention even to the most crying of injustices under which they suffer. The Home Office must attend first to the claims of those who can bring pressure to bear on it; and Members of Parliament must bring in the measures pressed by their constituents; and thus the unrepresented must go to the wall.