What eight million women want Part 5

But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative matters. To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of the State Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty carefully chosen women.

This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every session of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for approval to the committee.

Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good authority, that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians of their children, and the education of children has been placed almost entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of schools.

Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the Union a well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon, which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.

"There is one thing that is not _French_," thundered the great Napoleon, closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can do as she pleases."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES]

The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she added a codicil to her will, giving to a certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of very valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that two women had signed the doc.u.ment as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then living, no woman may witness a doc.u.ment. Women's signatures are worthless.

In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engaged girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.

Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in Louisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband. Every dollar a woman earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may be in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her business.

Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in fact, her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may become their guardian, but if she marries a second time--and the law permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months--she retains her children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand the custody of the children.

It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property rights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.

But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books, and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.

Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado where women vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the property rights of women.

In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.

The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings in Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and Idaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights are merely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.

Women to control their own business property must be registered as traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Ma.s.sachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.

Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]

There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her living.

If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which they provide for their brothers.

Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits women to post-graduate courses.

You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do with a woman doctor.

Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.

Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the American mother? When the club women began the study of their position before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.

In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to contribute to their support, she has joint guardians.h.i.+p. Under somewhat similar circ.u.mstances Rhode Island women have the same right.

In all the other States and territories children belong to their fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.

It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.

The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina allows no divorce for any cause. The sanct.i.ty of the marriage tie is held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly at her parent's home in the city of Was.h.i.+ngton.

One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_ them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.

Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however, showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was brought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justice and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge, justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law was unconst.i.tutional._

There are other hards.h.i.+ps in this law denying to mothers the right of co-guardians.h.i.+p of their children. Two names signed to a child's working papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work, when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.

The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. He can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the money they earn, and no one may interfere.

A family of girls in Fall River, Ma.s.sachusetts, were met every pay day at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'

wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls pa.s.sed their childhood and were mature enough to rebel successfully.

It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential services of a child.

Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of California for a law giving them equal guardians.h.i.+p of their children.

The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a large majority.

What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed measure? Identically the same that were made in Ma.s.sachusetts and New York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardians.h.i.+p of their children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and leaving home? What would become of the sanct.i.ty of the home, with its lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.

At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support his wife. The husband is under an a.s.sumed obligation to support his family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but n.o.body seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of affairs quite as serious.

Laws have been pa.s.sed in most States making family desertion a misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.

Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws, so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.

But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.

Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the a.s.sumption of the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in twentieth century civilization.

American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle cla.s.s of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men's.

Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support.

Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of managing the household, begins to a.s.sume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes.

In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.

CHAPTER V

WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY

The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, s.h.i.+rt-waists, coats and suits, infants'

wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side; groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."