the women's movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an editor, responded, "The World innocently asks us the question, why, like the Englishwomen, we do not sit still in our conventions, and get "first class men" to do the speaking? We might, with equal propriety, ask the World's editorial staff why they do not lay down their pens and get first class men to edit their journal?"The Revolutions correspondents were not expected to present a single point of view. On the contrary, the newspaper declared, "those who write for our columns are responsible only for what appears under their own names. Hence if old Abolitionists and Slaveholders, Republicans and Democrats, Presbyterians and Universalists, Saints, Sinners and the Beecher family find themselves side by side in writing up the question of Woman Suffrage, they must pardon each other's differences on all other points". An important function of the paper was to provide a forum in which its readers, most of whom were women, could exchange opinions. Its readers responded with a steady stream of commentary from a variety of viewpoints. Sometimes those readers identified themselves fully, but many signed themselves with as little as a single initial, leaving their identities still unknown. The writers of the newspaper found inspiration in John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, which had been published in 1869. Following years of British reformers' criticism on the topic, Mill wrote that marriage was an institution of despotism and ushered the discussion into a more mainstream domain. Stanton looked up to Mill and used his ideas as a guide for her own. By 1869, Stanton was alone in writing the newspaper. She enthusiastically turned to the themes of sexuality and marriage, seizing the opportunity to use a local New York scandal as a caustic platform. The scandal was the trial of Daniel McFarland, a man who was convicted of murdering his ex-wife Abigail's fiancé, Albert Richardson, who had been a popular writer for Horace Greeley's Tribune. In writing about the trial, Stanton was determined to break through the "hypocrisy that prevented frank discussion of marriage by bringing the steamy facts of desire, jealousy, and extramarital sex uncomfortably close in a way that oblique discussions about coverture could not." The judge would not recognize Abigail's divorce and therefore prevented her from testifying against her husband, who was eventually acquitted on grounds of insanity. After the verdict, Stanton appealed for change—namely, for divorce