For so long now has the world been accustomed to seeing her going about, doing as she pleases almost as any other adult, that we have forgotten that she ever couldn’t. She can acquire education. She can own property. She has been able for some time now to get into a great many occupations and professions: only her difficulty was to get up. And there has been that limitation to her income. It has remained stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that of a man’s income. The teaching profession affords statistics that are world-wide testimony to the situation that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J., to Archangel, Russia: there have been women school teachers working for a less wage than the man school janitor: there have been women professors at the head of high school departments at a salary less than that of the men subordinates whom they directed. Still, in all of her personal affairs, a spinster in every country has been for a long time now as free as the rest of the people. SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her finger, she has put her name to a contract that has more or less signed away her liberty, according to the part of the world in which she happens to live. In Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a woman’s participation in world affairs. She may have lost property rights, personal rights, political rights, or perhaps she has lost her job, her right to work and be paid for it. At any rate, she must look around to determine how many of these things may have happened to her. Any of them that haven’t, are special exemptions from that universal ruling of all nations that a woman on marriage enters into a state of coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. “Disability” is defined by Dicey’s “Digest” as the “status of being an infant, lunatic, or married woman.” And there you are.