question there can be only one reply. If it is ill, as we all admit, why do we not encourage the women of these middle classes to work and marry like the women of the poorer classes who are practically all married? Why in England and Germany and the United States are there these thousands upon thousands of unmarried women teachers, a celibate class like the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, and like them an ever present menace to the welfare of the state? Why in Italy, on the other hand, are so many of the women public school teachers married? Because in Germany and England and the United States women teachers lose their positions when they marry, and marry and starve they cannot. Because in Italy women teachers are allowed to marry and teach. Is it inconceivable that the state of the future in which women as well as men will vote will deprive women of bread because they wish to marry?

Marriage Laws in 1850

By Clarina Howard Nichols

(From speech at Woman's Suffrage Convention in 1852. Quoted from "Life of Susan B. Anthony.'')

If a wife is compelled to get a divorce on account of the infidelity of the husband, she forfeits all right to the property which they have earned together, while the husband, who is the offender still remains the sole possession and control of the estate. She, the innocent party, goes out childless and portionless by decree of law, and he, the criminal, retains the home and children by favor of the same law. A drunkard

takes his wife's clothing to pay his rum bills, and the court declares that the action is legal because the wife belongs to the husband.

men.

A Preventive of Divorce

By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson

(From "Parents and Their Problems.'')
(See page 173)

...

And here we come to the most potent of all causes of divorce-the conventionally enforced idleness of many married women-parasitism, Mrs. Schreiner calls it-and the overwork of many of our The rush of our present life comes to bear most heavily on our most chivalrous. It wears them out physically and mentally and discourages them spiritually before they are fifty years of age. It gives them only time enough to nourish a vague doubt of the womanhood that is content to fatten their toil, instead of laboring staunchly with them as healthy women should do. They find their usefulness limited, their powers exhausted, and wonder why. And then, sometimes in utter weariness they throw off the yoke and try to begin again. But the women are not always wholly to blame for this condition. Sometimes with a perfectly unreasoning "I can support a wife" pride, a man will insist that a woman give up once and forever the only work in which she takes an interest, and leaves her a choice between idleness and housework in his home (which always, with or without fitness, a man will permit a woman to do)! But if a woman should say to her husband before, or

soon after marriage, "John, it does not please me that you should be a lawyer-you must become a stock broker," or "James, when you marry me you must give up the art you love and become a carpenter,' would we not be quick to decry her injustice? Yet there are men who still say to their wives, "The work you love you must give up. You may do the work I provide or none at all.”

Of course, motherhood brings to women certain limitations, but the thing we do not recognize is that these limitations are temporary. And, if, in the ages past, women were able to combine with motherhood the most arduous physical labors, it seems probable, that, in the present and future when the demands of maternity are less rigorous, women should be able, with gain to the race, to enter new fields of labor and accomplish laudable results.

Surely there is no greater safeguard for man and woman than the work in which mind and body can delight.

Wash.)

Overheard in the Marriage Congress

By Adella M. Parker

(From the Suffrage Edition of the "Daily News," Tacoma,

Once upon a time all the men in the world gathered together to make the laws of marriage. And the women, learning of this, gathered also, protesting and saying:

"A woman is one of the parties to every contract of marriage. Why do we also not make the laws of marriage?"

"Woman's place is at home," said the men.

"But," said the women,

"the marriage agree

ment is the very basis of the home."

"Yes," said the men, "but woman's place is at home. It is not her place to create the conditions that make the home."

"For how long is the marriage contract?" asked the women.

"Forever," said the men. Then the women said: "Suppose we should insist upon helping to make the contracts we enter into?"

"It wouldn't be lawful," said the men.

"Who makes the laws?" said the women.
"We do," said the men.

"And do the men make the laws concerning the rights of children?" asked a woman with a babe in her arms, and another at her heels.

"Oh yes," said the men.

"And the laws concerning a woman's rights with respect to her own child?"

"Yes," said the men, "the women bear the children, but the men determine their legal control." "Can the marriage contract ever be broken?" asked the bravest one of the women.

"No," said the men," it can't be broken except upon facts that can't be proved."

"Do the men keep the marriage vows?" softly asked a woman 'way at the rear.

"Hush," said a portly landlord who owned a "restricted district;" "no respectable woman would ask such a question.' Then a thoughtful woman earnestly asked:

"Will there not be more murders, and more suicides and more insanity if the women have not part in settling the terms of marriage?"

But the Lombrosos and the Allen McLane Hamiltons and all the other criminologists and insanity experts paid no heed to this question. Finally the women said:

"But suppose we don't enter into these contracts that you make?”

"Oh, but you will," said the men.

And they did. But some of the women got even.

The Cry of Man to Woman

By C. Gasquoine Hartley

(From "The Truth About Woman.'')

The cry of man to woman under the patriarchal system has been, and still for the most part is, "Your value in our eyes is your sexuality; for your work we care not.' But mark this! The penalty of this false adjustment has fallen upon men. For women, in their turn, have come to value men first in their capacity as providers for them, caring as little for man's sex value as men for women's work-value. From the moment when women had to place the economic considerations in love first, her faculties of discrimination were no more of service for the selection of the fittest man. Here we may find the explanation of the kind of men girls have been willing to marry-old men, the unfit fathers, the diseased... And it is the race that has suffered.