What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, 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 passed 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 guardianship 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 Massachusetts and New York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and leaving home? What would become of the sanctity 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 assumed 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 nobody 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 passed 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 assumption 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 class 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 assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes.