your remonstrant has had personal and painful experiencehaving been in the year 1847, after twelve years of medical practice in Boston, refused permission to attend the lectures of Harvard Medical College-that fact would seem to furnish an additional reason why the city should provide at its own expense those means of superior education, which, by supplying our girls with occupation and objects of interest, would not only save them from lives of frivolity and emptiness, but which might open the way to many useful and lucrative pursuits, and so raise them above that degrading dependence, so fruitful a source of female misery. Reserving a more full exposition of the subject to future occasions, your remonstrant in paying her tax for the current year, begs leave to protest against the injustice and inequalities above pointed out. This is respectfully submitted, BOSTON, October 18, 1852. 32 Green Street. The protest was copied in many American, as well as some English papers. It elicited inquiry, and many facts were brought to light illustrating the injustice of taxation without representation." Dr. Hunt continued to protest every year as long as she lived, and her example was followed by women in Worcester, Plymouth, Lowell, Malden and perhaps in other places. No notice was taken of these protests by the proper authorities to whom they were addressed, but they served their purpose as a means of agitating the Woman's Rights question. The cry, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," has been ding-donged into the ears of the men of Massachusetts for the last thirty years. By and by, per. haps, they will begin to understand what it means. F. CONVENTIONS AND WOMEN'S MEETINGS HELD BY MRS. CAROLINE HEALEY DALL. MRS. DALL'S connection with the early Woman's Rights movement in Massachusetts is very important. She held a successful Convention, (not mentioned in the text), June 1st, 1860, at the Meionaon, in Boston. Caroline M. Severance presided, Samuel J. May, R. J. Hinton, Harriet Tubman, Rev. James Freeman Clark, Dr. Mercy B. Jackson, Elizabeth M. Powell, and Wendell Phillips, took part in the discussion. Theodore Parker had recently died in Florence, Italy, and Mrs. Dall made an able address on the work of his life. Mrs. E. D Cheney offered a resolution on the untimely death of this distinguished reformer. In the evening, Mrs. Dall spoke on the influence of law and literature upon the woman movement. So many women of position and culture had already become interested in this question, that this Convention may be called the most aristocratic meeting of the kind held up to that date. Previous to 1860, Mrs. Dall had given a course of twelve lectures in Boston, on the various phases of woman's rights. In them she claimed: 1. Woman's right to civil position. 2. Woman's right to higher education. 3. Woman's right to choice of vocation. 4. Woman's right to self-protection in the elective franchise. A resumé of these lectures was published in 1868, in book form, called "The College, the Market, and the Court." Mrs. Dall's writings did a good work in forming public opinion, and creating interest on the subjects of which she treated. Some of the doctrines she taught had never before been publicly presented to Boston audiences. Her fresh and untrammelled thought was like seed-grain, and it was planted deep, to spring up and bear fruit for the increase of the woman's rights agitation. She made many distinguished converts. On her own authority it may be stated that she presided at the meeting when Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in his adherence to the Woman Suffrage Cause. Considering the early date of Mrs. Dall's labors in this direction, it is not too much to say, that her influence was of so great value that her name deserves to be recorded with those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Through her special efforts women were first put on the board of Officers of the American and the Boston Social Science Associations, and the result of this action vindicated at once and forever woman's fitness to occupy the same position in all public societies and associations, that man had hitherto claimed for himself alone. Since 1865 the American Social Science Association has admitted women to a position of entire equality, as members, officers, and as speakers at its annual conventions. This has been of great benefit, since it has encouraged women to express themselves in the presence of the wisest men, and enabled them to present to the public the woman side of some great questions. G. THREE MIDDLESEX COUNTY CONVENTIONS. IN 1875 three important woman suffrage conventions were held by the Middlesex County Woman Suffrage Association in the towns of Malden, Melrose and Concord. These meetings were conducted something after the style of local church conferences. They were well advertised, and many people came to them. A collation was provided by the ladies of each town, and the feast of reason was so judiciously mingled with the triumphs of cookery, that converting to the cause was never done so easily and so harmoniously. Many women present at one or the other of these conventions, said to the president: "I never before heard a woman's rights speech. If these are the reasons why women should vote, I believe in voting. I never thought of the subject in that light before." At the Malden convention speeches were made by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Lucy Stone, Miss Mary F. Eastman, Miss Huldah B. Loud, Henry B. Blackwell, Rev. George H. Vibbert, Rev. S. W. Bush, Rev. D. M. Wilson, and the president of the association, Mrs. Harriet H. Robinson. Letters were received from William Lloyd Garrison, Elizur Wright, Richard P. Hallowell, Bishop Gilbert Haven, Judge Robert C. Pitman, Hon. George F. Hoar and Mrs. Mary A. Livermore. An able set of resolutions, prepared by W. S. Robinson (" Warrington") was adopted: Resolved, That Woman has an equal right with man to the ballot, and that to deprive her of the use of it is an act of usurpation which ought to be immediately discontinued. Resolved, That we care not whether the right of Suffrage be called natural and absolute, or conventional, or dependent on capacity, or property, or on any kind of qualification which may be acquired, it is the same in woman as in man; that historically and legally — by Genesis and by the Statutes, this equality is specially recognized. Resolved, That the reasons why women were excluded from voting at certain elections (not at all) and upon certain subjects (not upon all) by the framers of the Constitution, are no longer applicable; because, since the year 1780, woman has, in hundreds of instances, individually and in classes, broken over those restraints which were once held to keep her in subordinate positions in the active affairs of life; she teaches, preaches, practices the medical profession, edits newspapers, buys and sells, owns and manages property, and transacts business of all descriptions. The reason for the exclusion of Woman from the Suffrage having vanished, let the spirit and practice of exclusion go with it. Resolved, That the pretense that Woman should be kept from the ballot-box and the town meeting, because govern ment is founded upon force and military power, is a legal and historical falsehood, inasmuch as the Constitution, by Art. x, Sec. 1, Chap. 11, specifies a certain class of elections for the militia alone to share in; and as, furthermore, to confine the Suffrage to those who form the military force would exclude from our elections thousands of males who now vote, or who are now specially complained of for not voting; and finally because by the last and perhaps most important of the Declarations of Rights, it is stipulated that the power of making the laws and the power of executing them shall be kept forever apart, to the end that "it may be a government of laws and not of men." Resolved, That the Legislature of Massachusetts, by persisting in its opposition to the granting of all petitions for the removal of usurping rules and statutes on the subject, is unjust; and that, no matter whether this spirit and practice of injustice be the result of carelessness or ignorance or malice, it is its duty at once to correct it, and no longer to interpose its own will and wilfulness against the demand of justice and the dictates of duty. THE MELROSE CONVENTION Was honored by the presence of Julia E. and Abby H. Smith of Glastonbury, Connecticut. These ladies, who have become famous, because of their resistance to the tyranny of "taxation without representation," told the story of their oppression in the most simple and effective manner. They stood upon the platform, (two gray-haired, sweet-faced ladies, both over seventy years of age, dressed just alike), and were introduced to the large audience. They remained standing; and while one read her carefullyprepared little speech, the other stood near and nodded approval, and, at the right time, reminded her sister of any little point about the sale of the cows that she had omitted, with "Don't you remember, Abby, that he was real rough to Whitey?" or "He said it much stronger than that, Abby." The story they told is as follows: |