What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks, as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor of the present-day city of Paris.

The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil and military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of a slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regulated conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.

The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals are forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed out of the memory of man,—all except one paragraph of one division of one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special division distinguished between real and personal property, and the paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that she might not inherit land.

There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this issue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Law permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the European states.

At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the "Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now a special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to be ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.

The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, than exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, and with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but it affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization. From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.

The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended from Feudalism, in which social order the person did not exist. The social order consisted of property alone, and the claims of property, that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual. Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown, chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because the offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.

In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a result of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned property, or who were administering property for their minor children, were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification, and the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England are making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property qualification.

The real position, legal and social, which women in England and continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels. And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have somewhat been loosened.

A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzig formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea of the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights, Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more, but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests. Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.