For so long now has the world been accustomed to seeing her going about, doing as she pleases almost as any other adult, that we have forgotten that she ever couldn’t. She can acquire education. She can own property. She has been able for some time now to get into a great many occupations and professions: only her difficulty was to get up. And there has been that limitation to her income. It has remained stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that of a man’s income. The teaching profession affords statistics that are world-wide testimony to the situation that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J., to Archangel, Russia: there have been women school teachers working for a less wage than the man school janitor: there have been women professors at the head of high school departments at a salary less than that of the men subordinates whom they directed. Still, in all of her personal affairs, a spinster in every country has been for a long time now as free as the rest of the people.
SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM
Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her finger, she has put her name to a contract that has more or less signed away her liberty, according to the part of the world in which she happens to live. In Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a woman’s participation in world affairs. She may have lost property rights, personal rights, political rights, or perhaps she has lost her job, her right to work and be paid for it. At any rate, she must look around to determine how many of these things may have happened to her. Any of them that haven’t, are special exemptions from that universal ruling of all nations that a woman on marriage enters into a state of coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. “Disability” is defined by Dicey’s “Digest” as the “status of being an infant, lunatic, or married woman.” And there you are.
It was from that predicament that the earliest woman’s rights’ associations sought to extricate the woman who had taken the wedding veil and ring. Susan B. Anthony’s first most famous achievement back in the sixties was a law establishing the right of a married woman in New York State to the ownership of her own clothes! By specific enactments since then, one and another of the rights to which other human beings are naturally born have been bestowed on married women. The most clearly defined of these, and the most widely recognised at last, are the right to their separate property and the right to their own earnings, which prevails in most of the United States. The Married Women’s Property Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 14 years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall and the Société l’Avant Courriere in 1907 at last secured the law giving to the married woman the free disposition of her salary. But these concessions it is not easy to disentangle from that basic notion, which is warp and woof of the whole fabric of law, that a married woman has passed under the guardianship of her husband.
For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, “separate property” to ensure her title to it, must be specially secured to her by an antenuptial contract. In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they remain in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them in bonds, provided first she either makes affidavit before a notary proving her ownership or brings a written permit from her husband. In the State of Washington, the supreme attempt to confer equality on woman finds expression in the statute: “All laws which impose or recognise civil disabilities upon a wife which are not imposed or recognised as existing as to the husband, are abolished.” But in spite of that most laudable effort, the end is not yet attained. For the State of Washington is still enmeshed in the community property system, by which the management and control of the common property in marriage is vested in the husband. And although the law has been distinctly framed that a married woman is entitled to her own earnings, it practically takes them away from her by requiring her to count them in with the community property which is under her husband’s control. The atomic theory, you see, was not more firmly fixed in science than is this idea that has been embedded in the social structure that a married woman is legally, civilly, and politically a minor!
Even in these United States, where the mention of the “subjection of woman” raises a smile, so largely has it by the grace of the American man been permitted to become a dead letter, the employment of married women has remained against public policy. Many boards of education have by-laws about it. Even these women teachers who commit matrimony and conceal it are almost invariably later on detected and dropped from the pay roll when found guilty of maternity. Business houses have shared in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 adopted a rule requiring the resignation of woman employés on marriage. Because the married woman, the bank president said, “should be at home, not at a typewriter or an adding machine.” Similarly a United States civil service regulation reads: “No married woman will be appointed to a classified position in the postal service, nor will any woman occupying a classified position in the postal service be reappointed to such position when she shall marry.”
A world has been arranged, you see, on the assumption of the complete eclipse of the personality of the married woman—with the burden resting on her to disprove it in the legal situations where she has come to be recognised as an individual. Custom prefers that a married woman should be a dependent person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist bombardment had not dislodged from the popular mind. Now in four years of war, it has crumbled.
“Women wanted,” called the world in need, wanted even though married! And out of the seclusion and separation to which she was hitherto consigned, the woman with the ring has come to find her wage envelope. All regulations against her employment are now rescinded in Europe, as soon they will be here. The working woman in particular has been given her release. The state, you remember, will now cook her meals and care for her children. And it was all a mistake that attributed infant mortality to the industrial employment of mothers. Now it is found that a wife’s wage envelope really reduces infant mortality by improving environment. There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber’s children, you know, dying in three rooms than in two!
The ban on the married woman in the civil service and in the professions is lifted. The Association of Austrian Women’s Organisations in their 1916 convention passed the resolution demanding the abolition of the “celibacy clause” for women office holders. And although no country has as yet formally erased this from the statute books, governments have at least tacitly consented to remember it no more against a woman that she has married. That is why Dr. Edith Russell is again practising medicine in the public health service and Prof. Elsa von Stuttgart is teaching philosophy. Especially in medicine is it recognised that the married woman physician is more than ever fitted for a part in the campaign for the conservation of child life. And if she is also a mother, so much the better. Why was it never thought of before? Of course a person who has had a baby is the real expert who knows more about it than the person who never can have one. Women formerly dropped from the civil service on account of marriage have been recalled all over Europe. Even Germany has opened to them post, telegraph, and railway positions. So many masters in Germany’s upper high schools are at the front, that married women have been called to these positions. Hundreds of married women have been reinstated in the school rooms of England. Detroit, Mich., the other day repealed its regulations which forbade the employment of married women as teachers in the public schools. It is Russia that has led all lands in her recognition of the woman teacher, not only refusing longer to penalise her for marriage but actually, as we have seen, establishing for her the principle of equal pay for equal work.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MINOR