human
Readers of History, and Lawyers, are aware that women's wrongs are an ancient and terribly persistent fact.... Why has our law been so unjust to women?--Because women never had a voice in the making of it, and men as a class _have not realized the oppression of women as a class_ (the italics are my own).
gpt
Men have deep in their hearts the idea that women _ought_ to be their legal inferiors; that neither the persons of women nor their property ought to remain their own; that marriage is not a free union on equal terms; and that the law ought to favour the stronger sex against the weaker. It is remarkable that our law is more unjust to women than that of the great historically despotic nations, and in some important respects less favourable than that of the Turks. All these things point out that _equality of the sexes in respect to the Parliamentary Franchise_ is essential to justice. The conscience of men is opening to the truth....
human
Readers of newspapers cannot be ignorant of the miseries endured by wives from brutal husbands. In ordinary decorous families, sons at lavish expense are trained to self-support. The _daughters_ in one class have nothing spent on their education; in another, are educated as elegant ornaments of a drawing-room, where they live in luxury for a parent's delight; yet when he dies, and their youth is spent, they are often turned adrift into comparative poverty, incompetent for self-help. When complaint is made of this, the ascendant sex graciously tells them, 'they ought to marry,' and this in a country where women are counted by the hundred thousand more numerous than men; where also men do not universally accept the state of marriage. Meanwhile, the law is made as if to dissuade the woman from such a remedy. If she dare to adopt it, it instantly strips her of all her property, great or little; [Footnote: Since then some amendment of the wrong has been done by the Married Women's Property Act.