It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one of his sons a very valuable property.  Some time afterwards the father and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.  His plea in court was that his wife’s consent to the transaction had never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned in community, the wife’s consent did not have to be obtained.

This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge, but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could not afford it at all.

It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the peculiar asperity.  Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work.  They are supposed to be “weakly.”  Their wives and children work eleven hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and collect their wages.  The money belongs to them under the law.  Even if the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless.  The right of a man to collect and to spend his wife’s earnings is protected in many States in the chivalric South.  In Texas, for example, a husband is entitled to his wife’s earnings even though he has deserted her.

I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas.  Probably not, unless among low-class Negroes.  In all likelihood if a Texas woman should appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her, he would refuse to give the man her wages.  Should the husband be in a position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife’s earnings, nevertheless.

The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she known it, selected the country to which most American women owe their legal disabilities.  American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period when men were of much greater importance in the state than women.  The state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a king’s defender.  Women were valuable only because defenders of kings had to have mothers.

English common law provided that every married woman must be supported in as much comfort as her husband’s estate warranted.  The mothers of the nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered.  What more could they possibly ask?  In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.  What use had she for property?  Did she need it to support herself?  In case of war and pillage could she defend it?

Husband and wife were one—­and that one was the man.  He was so much the one that the woman had literally no existence in the eyes of the law.  She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none.  Her husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract between a married pair.  A contract implies at least two people, and husband and wife were one.  The husband could, if he chose, establish a trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own.  But you can easily imagine that he did not very often do it.