INDEX TO NOTES.

[By the law of England a girl is still marriageable at twelve and a boy at fourteen years of age; though the “age of consent” to intercourse not thus sanctioned has been recently raised to sixteen years in the case of girls. In the above matters, and notably in that of the marriageable age, England remains barbarously below most modern legislatures, and is indeed in the disgraceful condition of being not even on a level with China, in which country—as Mr. Byrant Barrett points out, in his Introductory Discourse to the “Code Napoléon,” p. 66—“In females, it would appear, consummation is not allowable before twelve,” while “the age for marriage in males is twenty complete.” China and England are but slightly in advance of ancient India, where, according to the precepts of Manu, as Mr. Barrett further shows, (p. 30), “The male of 24 years should marry the girl of 8 years of age; the male of 30 the female of 12” (Ordinances of Manu, ch. 9, sec. 94). Is not such conduct as this sufficient to involve as inevitable consequences “unripe maternity and untimely birth,” together with all their dire inherited miseries?]

“But I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are. With you I would equally elevate both sexes. Really enlightened women, disdaining equally the submissive tricks of the slave and the caprices of the despot, breathing freely only in the air of the esteem of equals, and of mutual, unbought, uncommanded, affection, would find it difficult to meet with associates worthy of them in men as now formed, full of ignorance and vanity, priding themselves on a sexual superiority, entirely independent of any merit, any superior qualities, or pretentions to them, claiming respect from the strength of their arm, and the lordly faculty of producing beards attached by nature to their chins! No: unworthy of, as incapable of appreciating, the delight of the society of such women, are the great majority of the existing race of men. The pleasures of mere animal appetite, the pleasures of commanding (the prettier and more helpless the slave, the greater these pleasures of the brute), are the only pleasures which the majority of men seek from women, are the only pleasures which their education and the hypocritical system of morals, with which they have been necessarily imbued, permit them to expect.... To wish for the enjoyment of the higher pleasures of sympathy and communication of knowledge between the sexes, heightened by that mutual grace and glow, that decorum and mutual respect, to which the feeling of perfect, unrestrained equality in the intercourse gives birth, a man must have heard of such pleasures, must be able to conceive them, and must have an organisation from nature or education, or both, capable of receiving delight from them when presented to him. To enjoy these pleasures, to which their other pleasures, a few excepted, are but the play of children or brutes, the bulk of men want a sixth sense; they want the capacity of feeling them, and of believing that such things are in nature to be found. A mole cannot enjoy the “beauties and glories” of the visible world; nor can brute men enjoy the intellectual and sympathetic pleasures of equal intercourse with women, such as some are, such as all might be. Real and comprehensive knowledge, physical and moral, equally and impartially given by education, and by all other means to both sexes, is the key to such higher enjoyments....

“Demand with mild but unshrinking firmness, perfect equality with men: demand equal civil and criminal laws, an equal system of morals, and, as indispensable to these, equal political laws, to afford you an equal chance of happiness with men, from the development and exercise of your faculties.”

—William Thompson (“Appeal of One Half the Human Race,” 1825, pp. xii, 195).

[The impotent and contradictory schemes of ethics which philosophers or schoolmen, ancient and modern, have successively evolved, have been but resultants of “unisexual wit.” With brilliant exceptions in Plato, Kant, and Mill, vainly may the various codes be searched for any suggestion of the identity, individuality, and equality, of woman. For though the philosophy of latter-day ethicists rightly disdains to reiterate or to countenance the factitious scriptural dogmas and imprecations declaratory or explanatory of woman’s unequal and subjugated condition, yet a parallel subjection and inferiority in her nature is still tacitly assumed, and on occasion traded upon, by these same ethicists; no counsel or consent of her own intelligence being asked, or disavowal recked of, in such propositions as, e.g., the “utilitarian” theses concerning her enounced by Archdeacon Paley or Mr. Jeremy Bentham;—the nominally “goddess,” but virtually “slave,” status assigned to her by M. Auguste Comte;—or the “due” amount of child-bearing postulated as prior to all “normally feminine mental energy” in her, by Mr. Herbert Spencer. As the bane of all theologies has been the implicated degradation and subserviency of womanhood to the unjustly favoured male sex, so the vital defect in the plans of ethics is this irrational disregard for the personality and interests of “one half the human race,”—this ignoring or negation of woman’s equal claim with man to consideration, position, and action, in all that relates to humanity, ethics included. At present the general masculine sex-bias, or selfishness, refuses to women the wisest and noblest a faculty in legislation conceded to even the meanest men; and justice and injustice, pessimism and optimism, struggle together blindly and helplessly in the dark. The true Ethic still awaits for its formulation the assistance and the inspiration of the intellect of woman equal and free: no other way can it be arrived at.]

[The Married Women’s Property Act, 1882, in the event of no specific marriage contract to the contrary between the parties, retains to any woman married since Dec. 31st, 1882, the possession, control, and disposal of her own property and earnings, precisely as if she still remained a single woman (feme sole); it further secures to every wife (whether married before that date or afterwards), the right to her own earnings, and various other property rights, entirely independent of her husband’s control.]

“One of those who fought to the last on the rebels’ side was the Ranee, or Princess, of Jhansi, whose territory had been one of our annexations. For months after the fall of Delhi she contrived to baffle Sir Hugh Rose and the English. She led squadrons in the field. She fought with her own hand. She was engaged against us in the battle for the possession of Gwalior. In the uniform of a cavalry officer she led charge after charge, and she was killed among those who resisted to the last. Her body was found upon the field, scarred with wounds enough in the front to have done credit to any hero. Sir Hugh Rose paid her the well-deserved tribute which a generous conqueror is always glad to be able to offer. He said, in his general order, that ‘The best man upon the side of the enemy was the woman found dead, the Ranee of Jhansi.’”—Justin McCarthy (“History of Our Own Times,” chap. xiii).

And on the 12th December, 1892, the Manchester Guardian reports:—

“The death is announced of Mrs. Eliza E. Cutler, wife of the doorkeeper of the United States Senate. In February, 1863, her husband’s regiment was at Fort Donelson and Mrs. Cutler was visiting him there, stopping at a house just outside the fortification. The colours of the regiment were also in this house. In the excitement which followed the first attack on the day of battle, the regiment went into action without its flag, but just as the fighting became the hottest, with odds terribly against them, they were cheered by the appearance of a woman with a sword in one hand, and bearing triumphantly aloft the regiment’s colours. This was Mrs. Cutler, who remained on the battlefield until her husband’s regiment was ordered on board a transport in the Cumberland river. She immediately went to the upper deck, where, with assistance, she planted the Stars and Stripes in the face of a galling fire. There she remained, in spite of all remonstrances, until they passed out of the range of fire.”

“A dogmatic conclusion that human life is on the whole more painful than pleasurable is perhaps rare in England; but it is a widespread opinion that the average of happiness attained by the masses, even in civilised communities, is deplorably low, and that the present aim of philanthropy should be rather to improve the quality of human life than to increase the quantity.”—Professor Henry Sidgwick (“History of Ethics,” p. 247).