At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home guaranteed to the family support by the husband.  It does not do that now.  There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the husband defaults.  There are no laws compelling the husband to support his wife.  The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty.  Family desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling of modern social problems.  Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.  The Legal Aid Society of New York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every day in the year.  Other agencies in other cities report a state of affairs quite as serious.

Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.  Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws, so they are practically non-existent.  It is true that if the deserting husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.

But that does not cure him nor support his family.  Mostly he is not arrested.  He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local authorities.  In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably safe.  Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by sending to jail for a short period.  The State is better off without such a man.  To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.

Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in twentieth century civilization.

American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent.  The present social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women physically on much the same plane.  As for women’s intellectual ability to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men.  There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades.  Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate.  As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men.  Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men’s.

Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support.  Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as independent human beings.  Their work of bearing and rearing children, of managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes.