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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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