Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his elbow and showed the little girl a paragraph.  Turning the pages, he pointed out others for her to read.  Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the little girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the law, apart from her husband.  She could own no property; she could neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own husband.  She was, in fact, her husband’s chattel.  If he beat her she had no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she could prove that her life was endangered.  If she ran away from him the law forced her to return.

Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her father, marked faintly with a pencil.  So far as she was aware, father, and father’s library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which took women’s homes away from them was perfectly simple.  That night when the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined to cut every one of those laws out of the book.

The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily.  As Elizabeth Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors, revising the rest.

Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governing men and women need equalizing.  In America, paradise of women, the generally accepted theory that women have “all the rights they want” does not stand the test of impartial examination.

In America some women have all the rights they want.  Your wife and the wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all.  Is the house yours?  The furniture yours?  The motor yours?  The income yours?  Are the children yours?  If you are the average fond American husband, you will return the proud answer:  “No, indeed, they are ours.”

This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderly cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.  For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages connected with that word “ours.”

In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,—­a man, his wife, and several half-grown children.  McEwan was not a very steady man.  He drank sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain.  Mrs. McEwan was an energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband’s failings, ambitious for her children.  She took a large house, furnished it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders.  The boarders gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before, and McEwan’s contributions fell off.  He became an unpaying guest himself.  All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.  The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks.