Mr. Henry Schloesser, barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, [Footnote: In his pamphlet published by the Women's Social and Political Union.] very explicitly explains how they affect women. "At Common Law the father is entitled against the mother to the custody of the children, and this right he could only forfeit by gross misconduct; so also he was entitled to prescribe their mode of education…. He remains prima facie the guardian of his children, to the exclusion of the mother" [the italics are my own]. "Alone of the learned professions, the medical is open to women…." (She constantly proves her aptitude to take the same honours as man as regards the others, but he still growls over his share and keeps her out.) "A husband is not bound at Common Law to cohabit with or maintain his wife."
These facts show luridly against the sky of woman's world, but perhaps few men know what purgatorial fires they light in many a woman's heart to-day. They show that man's injustice to her does not only concern her in public life, but even in the home life (to which he would fain limit her energies); she has practically no legal status at all. She has not even a right to her own children in the eye of the law. Quite recently a judge decided that "a woman is not a parent in the eye of the law," and therefore powerless in things relating to her children. She is excluded from the guardianship of them. Yet so curiously irrational is this same English law that, should any woman wronged by a man become mother to an illegitimate child, upon her falls the whole onus of its maintenance until it is sixteen years old. The man gets off scot-free; for the world which condones an offence (which is shared by both) in the case of the man, condemns it in the woman.
Thus, as Mr. Thomas Johnston [Footnote: The Case for Woman's Suffrage, by Thomas Johnston. Published by the Women's Social and Political Union.] very clearly puts it: "Where there is any stigma or blame, the woman bears it alone…. Under the law of England to-day a man can secure divorce by simply proving the unfaithfulness of his wife. But the wife, in order to obtain a divorce from her husband for the same unfaithfulness, must, in addition, prove cruelty or desertion." This in itself is very one-sided law, and certainly indefensible.
Francis Newman describes this law in no measured terms. He declares in his article on "Marriage Laws" (1867) that what undeniably needs reform in our country's government is "the extravagant power given by our law to a husband…. The exclusive right attributed to him over the children is unjust and pernicious. His rights over his wife's person [Footnote: According to English law, as evidenced in a recent case, the wife is not "a person" at all; presumably, therefore, she is simply his chattel!] are extreme and monstrous…. We need a single short, sweeping enactment that, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in past statutes, no woman henceforth shall by marriage change her legal status or lose any part of her rights over property….
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"We implore all true and genuine Conservatives not to delay and use half- measures, but to do justice to the sex in good time. He who tries to uphold injustice is the true and efficient revolutionist, while he thinks he is Conservative."
He goes on to touch thus on what is perhaps the most cruel injustice of all—that the law permits a man to deprive his wife of the children, who, before God, are as equally hers as his:—
"Not only with regard to property, also in regard to children, the law is unjust to women. The mother has to undergo much in bringing a child to maturity—the agony of childbirth… the countless cares of tending and watching by night and day. The child becomes the darling of her heart, the image of her dreams, the great centre of her thoughts and hopes; and after all her toils, the law permits a husband to take the child permanently out of her sight, and (if he choose) to put it under the charge of an enemy … who will fill its mind with falsehoods and teach it to hate and despise its mother. Such things are not possibilities merely and dreams; they are stern realities, and the law gives her no redress."
When one thinks of all that these words mean, one is face to face with the almost unthinkable fact that the case of the woman in England is unjust beyond description, and for this reason, that, as Newman says, "Men, who alone make the laws, make them with but little account of woman." At home with her children she is defenceless. She has no power over them, and her husband is not bound to "maintain" her, notwithstanding the sentence, which English law has made absolutely meaningless, of his marriage vow to her: "With all my worldly goods I thee endow."
In the world, if she have no husband or be unmarried, she is not a "person" in a legal sense; and during election time her house is described, in canvassing for votes, as having "no occupier"! In the world, too, she is unable to obtain a fair wage for her work. She may do the work as well as man, but nevertheless, in most cases, her pay is less. Mr. Johnston tells us that the average male worker's wage has been calculated to be about 18s., but the average woman worker's wage is only about 7s. And when women find out these many injustices suffered at home and in the world by their sex, as Miss Christabel Pankhurst says, they are absolutely unable to right these wrongs, for "women have no political power."