(Probably the most brilliant and effective of the early woman suffrage orators. Is said to have possessed a beautiful speaking voice, and great personal charm. The founder, with her husband, Henry Blackwell, of “The Woman’s Journal.” From “Susan B. Anthony, Her Life and Work.”)
The common law, which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is modified only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the “custody” of the wife’s person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property which he may will away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states, married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will; so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases.
A Possible Utopia
By Josephine Pitcairn Knowles
(From “The Upholstered Cage.”)
Nothing is permanent, there is going on always a continual shuffling of the cards of public opinion; trends of thought, standards of conduct come and go; and so when the day comes that women are more economically independent, then they will go on strike and sweep away all the unworthy suitors and declare that they will only mate with the physically and mentally sound, and then all considerations but love and respect will go by the board. This will appear but a distant and unrealizable Utopia to many who read this; nevertheless it will happen; all changes seem incredible from the distance, but when they crystallize themselves in fact nothing appears more natural or suitable. Every prophecy since the commencement of history has been scouted in its first inception, but when in time it has fulfilled itself it is seen to be the very thing awaited, natural and obvious, and a direct result of the past sequence of events.
Marriage and the Labor Market
By M. Carey Thomas
Recent investigations of the after lives of college women and of their sisters who have not been to college have shown us that only about one-half of the daughters of men of the professional business classes who do not inherit independent fortunes can look forward to marriage. Statistics seem to prove that only fifty per cent. of the women of these classes marry. What are the other fifty per cent. to do except work or starve? Most women of independent means marry because their inherited fortunes enable them to contribute to the support of the family. Women of the working classes marry because they too, can help by their labor to support the family. It is only the dowerless women who are prevented by social usage from engaging in paid work outside the home, or in manual labor inside the home, after marriage, who remain unmarried. All other women are married and at work.