But if the past is foggy, the present is not. We do know what is now,
and has for a long time been, a shocking list of what she must not be
allowed to do.

She cannot own and control her own property, for instance, except here
and there in the world. Perhaps the theory was that she could not
create property. But one would have said that such of it as she
inherited she had as sound a right to as that that her brother
inherited. But no such common sense notion prevailed. No matter how
she came by it, it became her husband's as soon as she married. The
law has always behaved as if a woman became a half-wit the moment she
married. Seeing what she deliberately lost by it, perhaps the law is
right. She lost control of her possessions, including herself. She
lost her citizenship, and she lost her name, though this by custom and
not by law. And finally, she never could acquire control even over her
own children, which certainly she did create. We do not know how many
of these disabilities would have been excused on the ground that they
were for her own good. It seems likelier that they came under the head
of that fine old abstraction, the general good. No longer back than
1914, H. G. Wells, in "Social Forces in England and America" observed
that they would probably never be able to give women any real freedom
because there were the children to consider. Mr. Wells did not appear
to know that he was bridging a horrible conflict in terms with a
pretty fatuity. Nor did he later give himself pause when, towards the
end of the book, he complained that all the babies were being had by
the low grade women, while the high grade ones were quite insensible
to their duties.

It was possibly with an unruliness of this kind in contemplation that