These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are trying to remove from the Codes.  They have their origin in the belief in “The imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility” of women, to quote from this Code Napoleon.

Whatever women’s legal disabilities in the United States, their laws were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or imbecile.  They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.

Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women stood in perpetual need of protection.  The law makers carried this to the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman needed or all she ought to claim.  They even pretended that when a woman entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood in need of an identity apart from her husband.  The working out of this theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.

CHAPTER IV

AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW

A little girl sat in a corner of her father’s law library watching, with wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a generation or two ago.  The weeping old woman told a halting story of a dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on her own part,—­a story pitifully sordid in its details.  The farm had come to her from her father’s estate.  For forty years she had toiled side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable, living from the soil.  Then the husband died.  Under the will the son inherited the farm, and everything on it,—­house, furniture, barns, cattle, tools.  Even the money in the bank was his.  A clause in the will provided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.

So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn of everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another woman,—­her son’s wife.  Was it true that the law took her home away from her,—­the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had lived in since childhood?  Could nothing, nothing be done?

The aged judge shook his head, sadly.  “You see, Mrs. Grant,” he explained, “the farm has never really been yours since your marriage, for then it became by law your husband’s property, precisely as if he had bought it.  He had a right to leave it to whom he would.  No doubt he did what he thought was for your good.  I wish I could help you, but I cannot.  The law is inexorable in these matters.”

After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer’s child went and stood by her father’s chair.  “Why couldn’t you help her?” she asked.  “Why do you let them take her home away from her?”