_Women._--To what extent can women play a part as executive instruments of child-protection? Women are better fitted than men to supervise the bodily care of children. Women can more readily gain the confidence of those who need support and protection--above all, the confidence of other women (especially of lonely and forsaken women) and of children. They are better judges than men of defects in housekeeping and how to remedy them. Many things are confided to women which are kept hidden from men; and women can remedy many concealed defects where men could do no good. Such duties as these are commonly performed by women more conscientiously than by men, &c. The following arguments have been put forward against the employment of women: (_a_) Women ought not to be exposed to the dangers and inconveniences inseparable from visiting the houses of the poor and other places subject to inspection; (_b_) Women are gossiping, soft-hearted, and credulous, so that they are unable to exercise authority, and are inclined to pay undue attention to exaggerated and quite irrelevant statements; (_c_) They interfere too much in the management of the households of the foster-parents, &c. These arguments are worthless. Besides, the question of the employment of women in such capacities can only be decided fairly with reference to the individual subdivisions of the work of child-protection. Unquestionably, women are suitably employed as children’s nurses, matrons of children’s homes, governesses and school-mistresses, wet-nurses, medical practitioners, factory inspectors, sick-nurses, confidential agents of the official guardians of children, visitors of foster-parents. Where the common people have no confidence in women employees, for example, in rough, uncultivated districts, where, in the interests of child-protection, police intervention is necessary, as, for example, in the case of morally depraved and uncontrollable children, and where trusteeship has to be undertaken as in the case of orphan children who are heirs to considerable property, women cannot be employed. The tendency of evolution is to employ women as executive instruments of child-protection, and, indeed, to employ them as salaried public officials. Numerous and serious objections must, however, be raised against the idea that ladies belonging to the upper classes should find amusement and relief from the tedium of their ordinary life by engaging in some branch of the work of child-protection (such as supervising the work of midwives, or visiting the foster-parents of boarded-out children). The work of such women is of little value in itself, and it takes bread out of the mouths of women who could do the same work very much better professionally and as a means of livelihood. SPECIAL PART _A._--DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL LAW AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS CHAPTER I MARRIAGE AND PARENTAL AUTHORITY