The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

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480 THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

higher standard of business honesty,- in the work of charity and correction, and in the care of the dependent, defective, and delinquent classes, men and women should stand
shoulder to shoulder, equals before the law; and until this
is attained, the highest success in these departments of work
and reform can never be accomplished.
I saw how women are degraded by disfranchisement,
and, in the eyes of men, aro lowered to the level of the
pauper, the convict, the idiot, and the lunatic, and are put
in the same category with them, and with their own infant
children. Under a republican form of government, the possession of the ballot by woman can alone make her the legal
equal of man, and without this legal equality, she is robbed
of her natural rights. She is not allowed equal ownership
in her minor children with her husband, has no choice of
domicile, and is herself the legal -property of her husband,
who controls her earnings and her children; -her only
compensation being such board and clothing as he chooses
to bestow on her. "1Women of England! " thundered
Canon Kingsley, when English women were struggling for
equal ownership of their own children with their husbands,
and for property rights, "1You must first secure legal equalHy with men, and then shall you have social equity!" The
good men of the nation, just, large-minded, and fair, are
better than the laws that are made for women, and they
protect the women of their households from the legal injustice and severity that ruin the lives of many, and break the
hearts of more. Laws are not especially made for the protection of those who are safe in the anchorage of manly
respect and affection, but for the weak and defenceless,