But in the new world woman’s place in the home assumed an importance much greater than it had formerly possessed.  Labor was scarce, manufacturing and trading were undeveloped.  Woman’s special activities were urgently needed.  Woman’s hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house.  She spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the country.  But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.  Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials.  These her husband provided.  In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in America, as in England, was the husband.

This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at best, of minor children.

It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters of law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration and indulgence.  As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuable because of the need of their labor, their special activities.  Also, for a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable.  In other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether new consideration and regard.

In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusive of his wife.  In America, violence against women was, from the first, an unbearable idea.  Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, as we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.

But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in the old, no new legislation was made for her benefit.  Her legal status, or rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained exactly as it had been under the English common law.

No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placing women at a disadvantage with men.  Whatever laws are unfair and oppressive to women have just happened—­just grown up like weeds out of neglected soil.

Let me illustrate.  No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill into the legislature making men liable for their wives’ torts or petty misdemeanors.  Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so completely her husband’s property that he is responsible for her behavior.  If she should rob her neighbor’s clothesline, or wreck a chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial.  Simply because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamed of as a State.