Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.

[Illustration:  MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]

There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men.  This is not quite true.  In some States a married woman may not engage in any business without permission from the courts.  In Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia this is the case.  In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her living.

If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you are barred from seven of the United States.  The legal profession is closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which they provide for their brothers.

Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the fact that women’s taxes help support the universities.  These States are Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina.  The last-named admits women to post-graduate courses.

You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman.  In Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of medicine, or a notary public.  Florida likewise will have nothing to do with a woman doctor.

Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.  Every woman hopes to be a mother.  What then is the legal status of the American mother?  When the club women began the study of their position before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies of their own children.  In ten States only, and in the District of Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.

In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship.  Under somewhat similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.

In all the other States and territories children belong to their fathers.  They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother.  That this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.

It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.

The famous Tillman case is an example.  Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina has one son,—­a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married life, left him, taking with her their two little girls.  South Carolina allows no divorce for any cause.  The sanctity of the marriage tie is held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused at will by the veriest brute or libertine.  Mrs. Tillman could not divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly at her parent’s home in the city of Washington.