to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the
next one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of
women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our
language, without participating in one particle of our common life,
because their husbands have taken on American citizenship. They
wouldn't be allowed to become American citizens if they wanted to, by
any other means.

There are scores and scores of these legal absurdities conscripting
the activities of women. Twenty books could be written about them, and
probably will be. But we must leave them, with such representation as
these few instances afford, and go from, the body of taboos that are
done in the name of the good of the State, to that collection done for
Woman's own personal good.

Some of these are legal and some are not, but they are all operative.
They are all things she has to go around, or under. She cannot serve
on juries. She is always righteously barred from courtrooms when there
is to be testimony concerning sex. Woman, the mother of children, the
realist of sex compared to whom the most sympathetic of males is at
best an outsider, is to be "protected" from a few scandalous
narratives. Of course all women know that they are barred from juries
not because the happenings in court would shock or even surprise them,
but because they would embarrass their far more sensitive and finicky
men. So what they wish to know of court proceedings, they learn from
their good men, in the pleasant privacy of their homes. If the juries
are so much the worse for this sort of thing, and they are, the matter
cannot be helped by the ladies, dear knows, and the men would die
almost any death liefer than that of ravaged modesty.