This memorial from the Finnish women coincides perfectly in spirit with the new laws in process of construction for Scandinavia. When the Dutch Parliament, which has just conferred a new measure of suffrage on the women of the Netherlands, was in 1917 debating the matter, an alarmed reactionary rose to object: “But how can married women vote? For married women are not free. They are like soldiers in barracks, who have lost the liberty to express their thoughts.” THE NEW FATHERHOOD Sir, that’s just the point. But the liberty that was lost, is found. No one, as we have seen, is going to compel this new woman to be anything that she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now as she goes on talking. For she is coming presently to that which is at the heart of the whole woman question, nay, more, the human question. “Dear,” she is going to say, “there is that which matters more than all the rest for us now to decide. It’s the children, the children are on my mind.” Then she is going to emphasise how important it is that parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws that men have made about it, quite universally, equally in fact in England and Germany and France and Italy and Russia and the United States, the father is the only parent. His will decides its religion, its education, and all of the conditions under which the child shall be reared. There are a few of the United States, most notably those where women vote and one or two others in which pressure has been brought to bear by the feminists, where the law has been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Australia, as soon as women have come into the vote, one of their first efforts has been to establish what is known as “equal guardianship,” the right of a married mother to her own child. To an unmarried mother, by a strange perversity in the statutes of men, is conceded not only all the right to the child but there is put upon her all of the responsibility of its parenthood. The new woman is not going to rest content to have it stand that way. Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood. The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no law. Why brand it, then, as “illegitimate”? War babies crying in all lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after government has arranged for what is called the “separation allowance” to go to the woman at home to whom the soldier at the front knows that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. So the War Office pen writes off one discrimination. Of children who used to be called “illegitimate,” 50,000 born annually in England and 180,000 born annually in Germany will now be entitled to start life with equal financial government aid that the others get.