RIGHTS OF LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.
We hear a great deal about the Rights of Women; and it seems to be taken for granted, that there are certain rights which women in general agree in claiming for themselves. Some difference, however, as to what are and are not the rights of women, appears to prevail among the ladies of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. In the House of Lords we find, on the one hand, that -
“Lord Dungannon presented a petition, signed by 800 women of Aylesbury and its immediate neighbourhood, against any measure for legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. He assured their lordships that the strongest repugnance prevailed among the women of England to any change in the law; and the present petition was only one out of many hundreds with which their table would before long be inundated. He trusted that any measure which mights be introduces into their lordships House for effecting a change in the law would meet with the same fate as its predecessors.”
Whereupon, on the other hand,
“Lord Wodehouse presented a petition from 428 women of Aylesbury and 145 women of Cheltenham, in favour of the legalisation of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. He was confident that the majority of the women in the country were anxious that the law should be altered, and he trusted that any measure which would be introduced for that purpose would be carried.”
The ladies of Aylesbury appear to be as completely at variance touching the Rights of Women in one particular, as their respective champions, Lords Dungannon and Wodehouse are about those of men in the corresponding respect. The ladies, on the one side, demand the right of being allowed to marry their deceased sisters’ husbands. Those on the other demand the right of continuing not to be allowed to marry the husbands of their deceased sisters. In like manner the lords are divided as to the Rights of Men; one noble lord requiring for them the right to marry a deceased wife’s sister, the other the right of being kept under restraint from doing any such thing. It may almost be imagined that two parties of divines, who differ as to a point of Christian morality, have been severally illustrating that edifying fact by getting up an agitation in Aylesbury amongst the ladies on the subject of their dissension, and have so far, happily, succeeded as to divide them into two represented, respectively, by Lord Dungannon and Earl Wodehose.
Does it not occur to Lord Dungannon and the ladies whose cause he espouses, that the marriage of a lady with her deceased sister’s husband, and that of a widower with his deceased wife’s sister are not ceremonies which it is proposed to make obligatory on widowers and surviving sisters? The noble lord and his clients have the right of refusing to contract such marriages if they please; cannot they be content with that, and with minding their own business?
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