“You can let your sole grow, Josiah Allen, by thinkin’ big, noble-sized thoughts, and I believe if you did, you would weigh more by the steelyards.”
“Wall, I don’t care, Samantha, I stick to it, that I am sick of wimmin’s rights; if wimmin would take care of the rights they have got now, they would do better than they do do.”
Now I love to see folks use reason if they have got any—and I won’t stand no importations cast on to my sect—and so I says to him in a tone of cold and almost freezin’ dignity—
“What do you mean, Josiah?”
“I mean that women hain’t no business a votin’; they had better let the laws alone, and tend to thier house-work. The law loves wimmin and protects ’em.”
“If the law loves wimmin so well, why don’t he give her as much wages as men get for doin’ the same work? Why don’t he give her half as much, Josiah Allen?”
Josiah waved off my question, seemin’ly not noticin’ of it—and continued with the doggy obstinacy of his sect—
“Wimmin haint no business with the laws of the country.”
“If they haint no business with the law, the law haint no business with them,” says I warmly. “Of the three classes that haint no business with the law—lunatics, idiots, and wimmin—the lunatics and idiots have the best time of it,” says I, with a great rush of ideas into my brain that almost lifted up the border of my head-dress. “Let a idiot kill a man; ‘What of it?’ says the law; let a luny steal a sheep; again the law murmurs in a calm and gentle tone, ‘What of it? they haint no business with the law and the law haint no business with them.’ But let one of the third class, let a woman steal a sheep, does the law soothe her in these comfortin’ tones? No, it thunders to her, in awful accents, ‘You haint no business with the law, but the law has a good deal of business with you, vile female, start for State’s prisen; you haint nothin’ at all to do with the law, only to pay all the taxes it tells you to—embrace a license bill that is ruinin’ your husband—give up your innocent little children to a wicked father if it tells you to—and a few other little things, such as bein’ dragged off to prison by it—chained up for life, and hung, and et cetery.’”
Josiah sot motionless—and in a rapped eloquence I went on in the allegory way.