Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/661

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THE LEGAL POSITION OF MARRIED WOMEN.
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that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An exclusively-scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusive literary training. The value of the cargo does not compensate for the ship's being out of trim; and I should be very sorry to think that this scientific college would turn out none but lop-sided men. There is no need, however, that such a catastrophe should happen. Instruction in English, French, and German is provided, and thus the three greatest literatures of the world are made accessible to the student."

Such is the way of it under the government of the classical Homer-student, Gladstone! An Englishman, who is master of only three living languages and the exact sciences, is held to be as highly cultivated as a barrister who understands only English and some Latin and Greek, but has steered his way cleverly through Oxford or Cambridge!

But fancy for a moment that it should occur to the mind of some opulent Jew (such an idea surely would never strike a Christian German) to found such a "Mason's College" in Germany, on the plan of "no religious teaching, no politics, no Latin, and Greek." Shocking! How happy we are to have a Stöcker, a Treitschke, and a Putkammer, who would not suffer a poison-plant like that to spring on German soil!

THE LEGAL POSITION OF MARRIED WOMEN.[1]

IT is my intention to indicate the historical scope and present bearings of my topic by a brief analysis of the following four conditions of social order involved in its consideration, viz.:

1. The law of social development underlying the various legal positions of married women, historically traced.
2. Classification of the principal types of marriage.
3. Summary of existing laws of married women in the United States.
4. Practical suggestions prompted by the study of these past and present facts.

Our first point (the social law controlling the varying position of married women) brings us at once to the fact that physical unions of men and women must have preceded all legal definitions of their relation to each other, or to their offspring. We begin to call these unions marriage, when the first headland of rude ceremonial selection appears above the sea of promiscuous passions. For a long while yet, no legal enactments fix the status of the wife; but from the time of

  1. A paper read before the Association for the Advancement of Women, at Boston, October 14, 1880.