Anti Slavery Bugle

Taxation without Representation.

The following 'protest' based on the leading principle of '76, and written by a lady extensively and favorably known in this community, will be read with much interest, as among the first practical fruits of the Woman's Rights movement. It will be easy enough to sneer at this letter, but its facts and argument, so clearly and soberly put, will have their effect on candid and thinking men.-Liberator,

To Frederick U. Tracy, Treasurer, and the Assessors and other Authorities of the City of Boston, and the Citizens generally:

Harriet K. Hunt, physician, a native and permanent resident of the city of Boston, and for many years a tax-payer therein, in making payment of her city taxes for the coming year, begs leave to protest against the injustice and inequality of levying taxes upon women, and at the same time refusing them any voice or vote in the imposition and expenditure of the same.

The only classes of male persons required to pay taxes, and not at the same time allowed the privilege of voting, are aliens and minors. The objection in the case of aliens is, their supposed want of interest in our institutions and knowledge of them. The objection in the case of minors is, the want of sufficient understanding. These objections certainly cannot apply to women, natives of the city, all of whose property and interests are here, and who have accumulated, by their own sagacity and industry, the very property on which they are taxed.

But this is not all; the alien, by going through the forms of naturalization, the minor, on coming of age, obtains the right of voting: and so long as they continue to pay a mere poll tax of a dollar and a half, they may continue to exercise it, though so ignorant as not to be able to sign their names, or read the very votes they put into the ballot-boxes. Even drunkards, felons, idiots and lunatics, if men, may still enjoy that right of voting, to which no woman however large the amount of taxes she pays, however respectable her character or useful her life, can ever attain. Wherein, your remonstrant would inquire, is the justice, equality or wisdom of this? That the rights and interests of the female part of the community are sometimes forgotten or disregarded, in consequence of their deprivation of political rights, is strikingly evinced, as appears to your remonstrant, in the organization and administration of the city public schools. Though there are open, in this State and neighborhood, a great multitude of colleges and professional schools, for the education of boys and young men, yet the city has very properly provided two High Schools of its own, one Latin the other English, at which the male graduates of the Grammar school may pursue their education still further at the public expense. And why is not a like provision made for the girls? Why is the public provision for their education stopped short just as they have attained the age best fitted for progress, and the preliminary knowledge necessary to facilitate it, thus giving the advantage of superior culture to sex, not to mind: The fact that our colleges and professional schools are closed against females, of which your remonstrant has had personal and painful experience—having been in the year 1847, after twelve years of medical practice in Boston, refused permission to attend the lectures of Harvard Medical College-that fact would seem to furnish an additional reason why the city should provide, at its own expense, those means of superior education which, by supplying our girls with occupation and objects of interest, would not only save them from lives of frivolity and emptiness but which might open the way to many useful and lucrative pursuits, and so raise them above that degrading dependence, so fruitful a source of female misery.

Reserving a more full exposition of the subject for future occasions, your remonstrant, in paying her tax the current year, begs leave to protest against the injustice and inequalities above pointed out.

This is respectfully submitted

HARRIET K. HUNT.

32 Green st., Boston, Oct. 18, 1852.