acknowledge their parenthood and assume the attendant responsibilities. I might remark here that some communities have tried to deal with this question in what seems to me a very bungling manner, namely: by forcing the “seducer” of a woman under the legal age of consent to choose between marrying her and going to jail. Such laws represent concessions to traditional prejudices, and have little relation either to justice or common sense. They take no cognizance of the inclination of the parties or their fitness for marriage; hence they afford a stupid way of legitimizing the child. It would be much more sensible to regard every child as legitimate by the very fact of having arrived in the world, and to demand of its parents a full discharge of parental responsibility, without complicating it with the very different question of marital obligations. Another legal provision which is as general as it is humiliating to women is that which permits a father to recover damages from the seducer of his daughter. This law, which is in force in several of our States, is supposed to find justification in the daughter’s status as a servant in her father’s house; but since the law grants him no similar redress for the seduction of a servant who is not his daughter, it is evident that its real basis is in a surviving notion of woman as the natural property of a male owner. These laws do not lessen the disgrace that attaches to extra-legal birth; rather they recognize and endorse it. The importance of abolishing illegitimacy is not to be underrated, for it means the removal of the legal sanctions which have enforced a barbarous custom. But the abolition of illegitimacy can not be expected entirely to remove the stigma attaching to unmarried motherhood and birth out of wedlock. That will disappear only when the economic independence of women shall have resulted in a spiritual independence which will lead them to examine critically the social dogmas that have been forced upon them, and to repudiate those which conflict with justice. In other words, it will involve an adaptation to more humane ethical standards; an adaptation which has begun but may be long in reaching completion, for superstition and taboo are not easily eradicated. II