Like this, the married woman has to-day been welcomed in industry, in commerce, and in the professions. This person of affairs abroad in the world a minor! It is more than a disability that she herself must endure. It becomes an annoyance to the world to have her so. According to Bacon’s Abridgement, a very imposing volume, it is still written that “the law looks upon husband and wife but as one person and therefore allows but of one will between them, which is placed in the husband.” But you see what a far cry it is from the woman in London or Paris or Berlin to “the one” on the western front. How is she to “obey” that man in the Vosges or on the Somme since she cannot have telegraphic communication about her daily movements? And without it, the French woman was left in a helpless tangle in the Napoleonic code.
Madelaine de Ranier at the head of a great business concern in Paris found herself forbidden to sign a check, unable to open a bank account. The Count had enlisted on the second day after war was declared and he had left with her a sum of gold. When it was exhausted and she faced the need of funds, she was unable to negotiate a loan on valuable bonds that she owned. Oh, the bonds were all right. The difficulty was that she was a married woman. And though very rich, she nevertheless was obliged to turn to friends who relieved her immediate financial necessities. Now in the drawer of her office desk there is a legal paper bearing the seal of France: across the bottom is printed “Bon pour autorisation maritale” and beneath is the Count’s signature. Until he had consented to make this arrangement, sending on from the front this “authorisation of the husband,” she was prohibited from transacting any business. For a married woman in France might not sell property or mortgage it or acquire it or sign a business contract or go to law without the consent of her husband! Women acting temporarily as mayors of some of the French villages, from which almost the entire male population has been mobilised, have found it necessary in order to execute municipal papers to turn to a male citizen for his signature, even though he might not be able to write and could only make his mark. Finally in 1916, the situation came up, for legal decision. The validity of a building contract entered into by a French woman was questioned in court. The judge after mature deliberation rendered a decision that although the woman was not empowered to sign the contract, yet as she had acted with the tacit consent of her husband and in his interest and that of the country, the court would uphold the validity of the act. “It is necessary,” he said, “that for the welfare of France, women shall take the place of men and perform duties which have hitherto been considered outside their sphere.” The Union Fraternelle des Femmes at once began pressing Parliament for the removal from the statute books of the requirement for “maritale autorisation.” And not long ago the Chamber of Deputies passed the bill granting to married women for the period of the war, permission to demand from the courts the right to do without this legal formality. Italy in 1917 completely swept away this same ancient restriction. The bill introduced by the Italian Minister of Justice, Signor Sacchi, abrogated not only maritale autorisation, but “every other law which in the field of civil and commercial rights curtails the capacities of Italian women.” Speaking for the measure in Parliament, Signor Sacchi declared it an “act of justice—of reparation almost, to which women have now more right than ever.”
But these civil disabilities have not been limited to Latin countries. You may find them anywhere as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply the natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture that the acts of the dependent person should lack authority before the law. Even in the State of Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of law to recover personal damages: her husband must join with her in the suit. Everywhere in the professions and in business, woman’s progress has been blocked because the courts, looking into the law books, found the status of this person in question. If her protected position more or less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the Married Women’s Property Act in England, which make her not liable to imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be “responsible” before the law? For any woman, though not yet married, is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice of law in America has been by the slow process of an “enabling act” from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly entitled “A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors.”
There is still another “disability” which is causing to-day perhaps the most world-wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had thereby lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her husband’s nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war. Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse than that of, the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go?
Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely, from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say but that in obedience to her husband she may be a spy? I stood at the desk in the Bow Street Police Station registering my arrival in London one war day, when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also addressed the sergeant: “I want to ask,” she said diffidently, “if I could possibly have my mail sent here to police headquarters? You see, it’s letters from my husband interned here in England because he’s a German. I’m an English woman. But every boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon as that envelope marked ‘Enemy Internment Camp’ arrives in my mail, turns me out.”
Like this, the “alien wife” has to be shunted about in many lands to-day. Even a woman who has not so lost her nationality may not travel without all of the credentials of her marital status to establish it. If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are asked for your husband’s birth certificate and under some conditions your marriage certificate. A married man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed that you are so under the authority of another person that there is no knowing what he may make you do. By all law and religion you have been taught to obey him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would you? The only way to make sure that you are a “safe” person to be at large, is to make sure of your husband’s loyalty. For your identity is not your own, you see, it’s his. If he happens to be French or Russian or German or Hottentot, so you must be.
WOMAN’S COMING OF AGE
That’s the way that men have made the world. Now see it beginning to be made over. Women everywhere are crying out in their conventions and associations that the married woman’s own nationality should be restored to her. America is the first country to take action about it. And here, because women have arrived at the halls of government, it is more than resolution and petition. The United States Congress has before it a bill proposing the repeal of the law compelling women to relinquish their American citizenship on marriage to foreigners. The bill was introduced, let us note, by the Hon. Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be a member of the national law-making body.
What was it man said a little while ago: “You do not need a vote, my dear. I will represent you in government and make the laws for you.” So all over the world he did. But isn’t it plain now that he made a mess of some of the laws he made for her? It is a conviction that has crystallised simultaneously in all countries that woman in her present independent sphere of activity has won her right to self-determination in all matters personally important to her. That is why measures for her enfranchisement are so universally under way. Let her vote for herself. Let her represent herself. No one else has been able successfully to do this for her. And it may be that now she will be able to make better arrangements for herself than others have for her in this world where certainly a great deal has gone wrong.
So we have arrived at woman’s coming of age. She who used to be by the most ancient family law passed as a chattel from the guardianship of a father to that of a husband, is now to be an individual. It is only now that she could be. In a way they were right yesterday who refused to regard her as a responsible person. For she wasn’t. Under the coercion of coverture, she even had to think the way that pleased the person who paid her bills! To-day with a wage envelope in one hand and a ballot in the other, she is as much of a human being as any one else is. As such, she is in a position to find the full status of her own personality. For the first time since history began, she will be under no one else’s authority.