Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of that ancient chrysalis of “coverture.” Have you by chance yet met among your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name? Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr. Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But she has never ceased to be herself. “You call yourself Miss McArthur,” a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, “and yet they say your cook tells that you are very respectable.” There are numbers of women like this in London and in New York, who are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, “Let us at mature age take an adult title.” Master Jones, you know, does not wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as “Mr.” Jones, Fraulein is but a diminutive, “little Frau,” a prefix of immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau, assured inquiring reporters: “Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why shouldn’t I be? I have passed my 35th birthday.” The Imperial Union of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the “unity title,” they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is significance of wide changes. She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law actually wrote her down on the statute books as _civiliter mortua_, one “civilly dead,” is about to be restored to the status of an individual. The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its slow way, is now at the sharpest turning. The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the discriminations that have limited their human activities set free the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the previous male guardianship over unmarried women and permitting a person “of staid age and character” to manage her own affairs. At first this was a privilege to be granted only on special appeal to the king. But at last the right of self-government at 21 was established for all unmarried women. So radical a departure from custom was of course not accomplished without misgivings. There were those who feared that for a woman to manage her own affairs, was not in accordance with true womanly dignity and the dictates of religion. They said, The majority of women do not want it. Why, then, give them a responsibility they do not wish or ask for? But in spite of those objections, the spinster came to be recognised as a responsible individual.