Woman and Her Wishes - 1853

WOMAN AND HER WISHES

AN ESSAY:

INSCRIBED TO THE MASSACHUSETTS CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.
 

BY

"Millions of throats will bawl for Civil Rights;
-- No woman named."        TENNYSON.

BOSTON:
ROBERT F. WALLCUT, 21 CORNHILL.
1853.

To the Members of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention:

THE publication in our newspapers of the list of members of your Honorable Body, has won the just tribute of men of all parties to the happy result of the selection. Never, it is thought, has Massachusetts witnessed a political assembly of more eminent or accomplished men. And yet there are a few to whom the daring thought has occurred, -- that to con­voke such ability and learning, only to decide whether our Legislatures shall be hereafter elected by towns or by districts, is somewhat like the course of Columbus in assembling the dignitaries of his nation to decide whether an egg could be best poised upon the larger or the smaller end. A question which was necessarily settled, after all, by a compromise,--as this will be.

But as, at that moment, there lay within the brain of the young Genoese a dream which, although denounced by prelates and derided by statesmen, was yet destined to add another half to the visible earth; so there is brooding in the soul of this generation, a vision of the greatest of all political discoveries, which, when accepted, will double the intellectual resources of society, -- and give a new world, not to Castile and Leon only, but to Massachusetts and the human race.

And, lastly, as we owe the labor and the laurels of Columbus only to the liberal statesmanship of a woman, it is surely a noble hope, that the future Isabellas of this nation may point the way for their oppressed sisters of Europe to a suffrage truly universal, and a political freedom bounded neither by station nor by sex.

T. W. H.