One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the children.  He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and gave them to his parents, made a present of a woman’s flesh and blood and heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.

Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United States Senator, upheld him in his act.  Young Mrs. Tillman, however, showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and his parents to recover her babies.  The judge before whom the suit was brought was in a dilemma.  There was the law—­but also there was justice and common sense.  To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge, justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that the law was unconstitutional.

There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of co-guardianship of their children.  Two names signed to a child’s working papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work, when the mothers know they are far too young.  A woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman.  “What could I say about it, when he went and got the papers?” she sighed.

The father—­not the mother—­controls the services of his children.  He can collect their wages, and he does.  Very, very often he squanders the money they earn, and no one may interfere.

A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her pay envelope, unopened.  It was his regular day for getting drunk and indulging in an orgy of gambling.  Often more than half of the girls’ wages would have vanished before night.  Twice the entire amount was wasted in an hour.  This kept on until the girls passed their childhood and were mature enough to rebel successfully.

It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential services of a child.

Many times have these unjust laws been protested against.  In every State in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by organized groups of intelligent women.  But their protests have been received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by legislators.  Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.  The women’s bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a large majority.

What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed measure?  Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New York a quarter of a century ago.  If women had the guardianship of their children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and leaving home?  What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity?  In California a husband is head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.