But these civil disabilities have not been limited to Latin countries. You may find them anywhere as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply the natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture that the acts of the dependent person should lack authority before the law. Even in the State of Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of law to recover personal damages: her husband must join with her in the suit. Everywhere in the professions and in business, woman’s progress has been blocked because the courts, looking into the law books, found the status of this person in question. If her protected position more or less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the Married Women’s Property Act in England, which make her not liable to imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be “responsible” before the law? For any woman, though not yet married, is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice of law in America has been by the slow process of an “enabling act” from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly entitled “A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors.” There is still another “disability” which is causing to-day perhaps the most world-wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had thereby lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her husband’s nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war. Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse than that of, the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go?