Even in these United States, where the mention of the “subjection of woman” raises a smile, so largely has it by the grace of the American man been permitted to become a dead letter, the _employment_ of married women has remained against public policy. Many boards of education have by-laws about it. Even these women teachers who commit matrimony and conceal it are almost invariably later on detected and dropped from the pay roll when found guilty of maternity. Business houses have shared in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 adopted a rule requiring the resignation of woman employés on marriage. Because the married woman, the bank president said, “should be at home, not at a typewriter or an adding machine.” Similarly a United States civil service regulation reads: “No married woman will be appointed to a classified position in the postal service, nor will any woman occupying a classified position in the postal service be reappointed to such position when she shall marry.” A world has been arranged, you see, on the assumption of the complete eclipse of the personality of the married woman—with the burden resting on her to disprove it in the legal situations where she has come to be recognised as an individual. Custom prefers that a married woman should be a dependent person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist bombardment had not dislodged from the popular mind. Now in four years of war, it has crumbled. “Women wanted,” called the world in need, wanted even though married! And out of the seclusion and separation to which she was hitherto consigned, the woman with the ring has come to find her wage envelope. All regulations against her employment are now rescinded in Europe, as soon they will be here. The working woman in particular has been given her release. The state, you remember, will now cook her meals and care for her children. And it was all a mistake that attributed infant mortality to the industrial employment of mothers. Now it is found that a wife’s wage envelope really reduces infant mortality by improving environment. There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber’s children, you know, dying in three rooms than in two!