'WOMEN'S RIGHTS (ante) in the United States sensibly advanced within the last 20 years in important particulars. The right of suffrage is not generally conceded as yet, nor is it likely soon to be, but important experiments have been made in that direction. Thus the territory of Wyoming in 1869 gave women the right of suffrage and admitted them as jurors; the state of Massachusetts allows women to vote in town elections for members of the school committees, and to be eligible for the position; and in both cases the experiment seems to have been fairly successful. The more prominent members of the woman's suffrage associations have claimed the right to vote under the U. S. constitution as it now stands, but all test cases have been decided adversely. The most noted of these eases are the appeal of Virginia L. Minor from the Missouri supreme court, in which an adverse decision was given by Waite, chief-justice Of the U. S.
supreme court, in 1874, and that of Susan B. Anthony and others, tried in 1873 before justice Hunt, of the supreme court, in the U. S. circuit court for northern New York. Salutary legal reforms as to the property rights of married women have been made in New York, Connecticut, and many other states, the general result being to give a mar ried woman control of her separate property and of that acquired by her own skill or labor after marriage. There are at present two great branches of the women's suffrage movement in this country—the national association, of which Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, and others are prominent members; and the American woman's suffrage association, with which Mrs. Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Mrs. Livermore are connected.