stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood
in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.





CHAPTER IV

AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW


A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching, with
wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
her own part,--a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son
inherited the farm, and everything on it,--house, furniture, barns,
cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will
provided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.

So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn of
everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another