the law decided that women should know nothing of birth control. Now
there's a taboo for you. Many of our very best people--the moral
element, so called--will not even speak the words. But that
prohibition, like all the others, has its side door--may one say its
small-family entrance? The women who do not know all there is to know
about it are just those poor, isolated, and ignorant women
economically starved who should be the first to be told.

Consider the quaintest, we think, of all the proscriptions against
women--that they cannot have citizenship in their own right. What is
citizenship if it is not the assumption, made by the State, that
because you were born within it, and had grown used to it and fond of
it, and were attached to it by all the associations of blood ties,
friendships, and what not, you were therefore entitled to take part in
it, and could be called on to give it service? If citizenship is a
mere legal figment, by what right do States send their citizens to
war? Yet women are theoretically transferred, body and bone, heart,
memory, and soul, to whatever country or nation their husbands happen
to give allegiance to. Isadora Duncan, born in California, of
generations of Californians, and American all her life, has lately
married a young Russian poet. Hereafter she must enter her country as
an alien immigrant--if it so happens that the quota is not closed.
Does anybody in his senses imagine that Isadora Duncan has been
changed, or could be changed, for better or worse? An opera singer who
was in danger during the war of losing her position at the
Metropolitan Opera House because she was an enemy alien, went forth
and married an American. By that means she was actually supposed to
have been made over into an American. Can naïveté go further?

For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done