In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engaged girl.  From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.  Your wedding presents are not yours, but his.  If you felt like giving a duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he could get it.  Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in Louisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband.  Every dollar a woman earns there is at her husband’s disposal.  Without her husband’s consent a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may be in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her business.

Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother.  Then, in fact, her position is nothing short of humiliating.  During her husband’s lifetime he is sole guardian of their children.  At his death she may become their guardian, but if she marries a second time—­and the law permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months—­she retains her children only by the formal consent of her first husband’s family.  If they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand the custody of the children.

It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often enforced.  It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property rights.  Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.  But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books, and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.

Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other forty-six States to choose.  None of them offers perfect equality.  Even in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah—­the three States besides Colorado where women vote—­women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless to remove all their disabilities.  Very rarely have club women even so much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the property rights of women.

In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.

The husband absolutely controls his wife’s property and her earnings in Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and Idaho.  He has virtual control—­that is to say, the wife’s rights are merely provisional—­in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.

Women to control their own business property must be registered as traders on their own account in these States:  Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.