THE LAW AND
THE WOMAN
By
HIS HONOUR JUDGE
EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY
Author of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” “Judgments in
Vacation,” “What the Judge Saw,” “The Law and the
Poor,” “Katawampus,” “Butter-Scotia,” etc.
“To which my Answer was, ‘The Lord mend those
evils, and no remedy but Patience.’ ‘_By God,
Donald_,’ said you, (I will use your own Phrase)
‘_we must help God to amend it_!’”
LORD REA’S accusation against DONALD
RAMSEY, Esq. Rushworth’s _Historical
Collections_, 1631, II. 114.
London
C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd.
17 & 18 Henrietta Street, W.C.
1916
Butler & Tanner Frome and London
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
AUTHORITIES 7
INTRODUCTION 9
I ADAM AND EVE 15
II MARRIAGE 29
III HUSBANDS AND WIVES 40
IV DIVORCE 53
V MOTHERS’ RIGHTS 69
VI WOMAN AS A WORKER 79
VII WOMAN AS A WRONG-DOER 95
VIII LAWS FOR PROTECTION OF WOMAN 105
IX WOMAN AS A CITIZEN 115
INDEX 126
AUTHORITIES
Instead of using footnotes a short list of the main authorities
referred to in each chapter is given for those who desire to study the
subject more thoroughly.
CHAPTER I
“History of European Morals,” W. E. H. Lecky, 1890.
As to the sale of wives see “The Annual Register” and “Notes and
Queries.”
“Ancient Laws and Institutes of England,” Benjamin Thorpe, 1840.
“History of the Anglo-Saxons,” Sharon Turner, 1836.
“Womankind in Western Europe,” Thomas Wright, 1869.
CHAPTER II
“The History of Human Marriage,” Edward Westermarck, 1894.
“London in the Eighteenth Century,” Sir Walter Besant, 1902.
CHAPTER III
“The Law of Domestic Relations,” W. P. Eversley.
“A History of the Rod,” Rev. W. M. Cooper, 1869.
“Commentaries on the Laws of England,” Sir William Blackstone, 1765-9.
“Regina _v._ Jackson,” Law Reports, 1891. 1 Queen’s Bench, p. 671.
CHAPTER IV
“Report on the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes,”
1912.
“Dodd _v._ Dodd,” Law Reports, 1906, Probate Division, p. 189.
CHAPTER V
“The Family,” Helen Bosanquet, 1906.
“Marriage,” Anne Besant, 1882.
“Rex _v._ Greenhill,” 1836. 4 Adolphus and Ellis, p. 624.
“Maternity Letters, collected by the Women’s Co-operative Guild,”
1915.
CHAPTER VI
“Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women,” Dr.
Elizabeth Blackwell, 1895.
“Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews,” Thomas Henry Huxley, 1871.
CHAPTER VII
“The Queen against Foxby,” 1703. 6 Modern Reports
CHAPTER VIII
“Grinnell _v._ Wells,” 1844. 7 Manning and Granger, p. 1033.
“Laws for the Protection of Women,” James Edward Davis, 1854.
“Legal Protection of Women,” W. Rulkoetter, Chicago, 1900.
“Report of Conference of the Criminal Law Amendment Committee,” 1913.
CHAPTER IX
“The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill, 1869.
“Ought Women to learn the Alphabet?” T. W. Higginson, 1873.
“The French Revolution,” Thomas Carlyle.
“Women in Politics,” Charles Kingsley, 1869.
INTRODUCTION
“He that telleth a tale to a fool speaketh to one in a slumber: when
he hath told his tale, he will say, What is the matter?”
_Ecclesiasticus_, xxii. 8.
I admire the way in which the old preachers and prophets who failed to
make their meaning clear to their neighbours always turned round upon
them and called them fools. It is a habit that still obtains with us,
especially among modern journalists, but we do it, I think, with less
conviction and certainly in poorer rhythm and epigram.
All that the writer in the _Apocrypha_ wanted to say was that when he
spoke about the social reforms with which his mind was over-burdened
nobody wanted to listen to him, and this was no doubt entirely his own
fault. The fact is that every citizen is in a slumber over the affairs
of his own generation. He is wide awake enough about the shocking
morals of Central African natives, or the awful social system of the
eighteenth century, but when you want to tell him tales about slum
dwellings, sweating and infant mortality in his own parish, he yawns
deprecatingly and asks, “What is the matter?”
I have noticed this attitude of mind among those to whom one has
spoken upon the subject matter of this little book. When people
discuss the rights and wrongs of Woman, other patient, sensible
people are particularly puzzled to know “What is the matter?” Now
there is probably a great deal the matter which is wholly outside
the Law, and this may safely be left with the neurotic, hysterical
and imaginative novelist to make her fortune with. Psychology and
physiology are dangerous matters for the ignorant to write about, that
the still more ignorant may enjoy unwholesome thrills. Herein I can
promise you no such entertainment. All I have sought to do is to make
a little practical handbook, stating in everyday language how the Law
as administered in our Courts to-day seems to me to deal out to Woman
justice of an inferior quality. How far this is so, how it came about,
and how with the least alteration and confusion it can be remedied, is
the plain tale I have set out to tell.
Let me say at the outset that this is not a law book, and though I do
not suppose that there is more bad law contained in it than in many
books written solely for lawyers, yet I wish to state that its primary
object is not to interest professional legal men, and as unfortunately
there are no professional legal women to be interested in it, I live
in hopes that it may be found acceptable, as the Victorians would have
phrased it, to many “fair readers.”
Though indeed I ought to warn intending fair readers that they may
not find it altogether to their mind--I have a feeling that to write
a popular book about the Law and the Woman it ought to be written by
some far-seeing philosopher who could assure Woman that in the near
future simple adjustments and alterations of existing laws would bring
about a vast increase in the happiness and prosperity of a large number
of women. As I do not believe that this will happen I cannot prophesy
it.
I have long come to the conclusion that Law has a great deal less to do
with happiness and comfort than people imagine. I am rather of opinion
that though it would be well if the laws of our country coincided with
the general common sense and humanity of the generation we live in,
yet in spite of the antiquated imperfection and even absurdity of much
of our law, human beings can to-day, as they have in the past, achieve
a certain amount of happiness by the exercise of good sense in the
management of their own social affairs.
I remember more than thirty years ago when I was editing Dorothy
Osborne’s letters, which were written in 1652-1654, making what was
then to me a great discovery. I found that amidst the sweep up of the
Civil Wars, when one would expect if ever to find bitterness, hatred
and gloom, the social life of the countryside resumed its homely,
placid course much as it does to-day within a few months of a general
election. Men and women went on with their gossip and their social
duties of everyday life, including the courtship and marriage of the
young folk of enemy households, and very soon even visits to favourite
watering-places and the pleasures of hospitality became the common
round and daily task of Dorothy Osborne and her friends.
The historians are no doubt right in impressing you with the idea that
history is a matter of governments, treaties and parliaments and laws,
but it dawns upon you when you escape from the glamour of the wisdom
of professors that not one of these things exercises an overwhelming
influence over the happiness of human beings.
Holding this view very strongly, it would be absurd in me to suggest
that this little book could possibly bring about any reforms of great
social value even if some caliph were to arise and enact it as Law
the day after its publication. The best it can hope for is to assist
the public in moving away some of the minor legal obstructions that
are utterly out of date, and thereby to contribute in a small degree
towards social betterment. There is a lot of legal machinery that
is merely waiting for a friendly shove to topple on to its last
resting-place on the scrap heap. Much of this Law is connected with
Woman, and it is only chivalrous and respectful to help to clear it out
of her path.
Here is where I think essays of this kind may be of service.
Originating in a series of articles in the _Sunday Chronicle_, they
have been revised and rewritten for the use of the average citizen who
cannot in the nature of things read the multitude of books which deal
with the history of the Law in relation to Woman; and without some
notion of the evolution of things and how they stand at present there
is little hope of his finding out the line of least resistance along
which he can advance towards reform.
Real reform perhaps does not come through Law, for Law is only a
statement--or more often the repeal of a statement--made long after
society has decided for itself what it intends to do. The real reform
is made when the will of the people is decided and acted upon, though
the legal reform may not come along for years afterwards.
The law relating to marriage with a deceased wife’s sister is an
example. Here the reform of the Law did nothing more than formalize
what all individuals with any sense of personal respect had long ago
decided and enacted for themselves outside the Law. Still there is no
doubt that many unjust laws are irksome, inconvenient and the cause of
unhappiness, especially to women, and as they can readily and easily
be repealed--and it is an undoubted fact that we want fewer laws--the
cause is one well worth working for.
In these pages, then, I have sought to point out the paths along which
the reformer can make for the heights of greater freedom and justice
for Woman as far as these things are attainable by Law, and though I
cannot see any Millennium to be brought about by legal reform, yet I do
not despise it, for I believe it to be a sensible, practical business,
and the study of it leads one among strange forgotten thinkers and
writers and is full of entertainment. We cannot all be great statesmen
bringing in far-reaching social schemes, nor are our great architects
of social salvation palaces invariably successful, for even their
magnificent edifices are found sometimes in a few years to be letting
in mud and water and showing signs of dry rot in the green timbers of
their foundations.
There are many small matters of legal reform touched upon in these
pages which could be made Law with very little trouble and which would
in my view make for happiness. When the Man in the Street understands a
little better how the Law stands in relation to Woman and what are the
battles of reform which are already half won, he will be able to help
Woman to fight these to a finish, and in this way leave the world a
little better than he found it.
EDWARD A. PARRY.
SEVENOAKS, 1916.
CHAPTER I
ADAM AND EVE
“After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the
beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than
inside it without her.”
_Extracts from Adam’s Diary_, MARK TWAIN.
The late Sir William Bailey thought that no public banquet was complete
unless Ox Tail Soup headed the menu. For this gave him the opportunity
of opening his after-dinner speech with an ancient and familiar jest.
“Gentlemen,” he would say with a merry twinkle in his eye, “when I saw
Ox Tail Soup on the menu I could not help thinking that we were going a
long way back to begin.”
I think he enjoyed that mild joke even more than his friendly hearers
who dutifully laughed at it, but to him it was a kind of oratorical
gambit from which he proceeded by skilful moves to discourse of the
earliest beginnings of the matter in hand.
Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things. There is
only one hopeful road towards this happiness--the study of the past.
You must trace back the streams of life to the ancient sources of
experience, and have enough of the child in you to search contentedly
and in faith among the myths and fairy tales wherein lie hid the
secrets of the world’s childhood.
And that is why I choose Adam and Eve as a fitting title for our
first consideration of the Law and the Woman. If I could have found
any earlier fable of the relationships of Man and Woman I would have
begun with that, but the story of Adam and Eve since it first passed
the Press Censor has been held to contain a message to the world alike
official, well-authenticated and popular, so that we may regard it,
like Sir William Bailey’s Ox Tail, as a very convenient terminus from
which to start.
John Milton set down in his story of Adam and Eve the basic truth
about the Law and the Woman, as it was in his time and ever has been
until the days of the present generation. The verses are the better
worth remembering because they are almost exactly in the form in which
mediæval man was wont to explain to mediæval woman the kind of thing
she really was.
My author and disposer, what thou bidd’st
Unargued I obey. So God ordains:
God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.
That is how Eve is said to have summed up the situation in the
early days of Creation before _lingerie_ was invented, and cunning
generations of Adams have sought to enforce the precedent against her
since she emerged from the Garden of Eden clothed and in her right mind.
All the old systems of Law known to the world possess this chattel
view of Woman’s status. Confucius tells his Chinese disciples that “man
is the representative of heaven and controls all things; woman must
obey the orders of man and aid him in carrying out his principles,” and
even at a much later date we find St. Paul sending the Corinthians a
message to the same effect.
As long as Woman herself was satisfied with the divine origin of a Law
which gave her many duties but no rights all was well. Of late years,
however, even the deafest and most ancient of our publicists must
have heard rumours that Woman was not at peace with the Early Adamic
theory of her legal and social position, and it is worth while to-day
to understand not only what the Law in relation to Woman really is,
but to consider whether everything necessary has been done to make it
fit latter-day social conditions. We may, indeed, discover, though
this should not be hurriedly concluded, that in their views of Woman,
Confucius, St. Paul and even Milton are back numbers.
I doubt if any one ever made a really new law all at once and all on
his own, as it were. I dare say if there were records to tell us about
it that we should find that even the Ten Commandments did not come
slap into the world as an entirely fresh proposition, but proved to
be sound, satisfactory laws because they found an echo in the hearts
of the people to whom they were given. Men probably had an instinct
against stealing long before it was made a statutory crime.
And there is another truth to remember in studying these matters.
Although the Law of the past may turn out to have been harsh and
cruel, yet the legal disabilities of Woman have not been meanly
exploited by Man. Man, to do him justice, is generally better than his
Laws. I confess I read with a light heart the diatribes of those social
historians who groan over Woman’s slavery in the world’s history. They
mistake the shadow of the Law for the substance of Life.
It is perfectly true, for instance, that in Roman Law man alone could
be the “father of the household.” The legal position of the Roman head
of the family--_Paterfamilias_--was one of much dignity and power, but
I doubt whether the old gentleman had a much better time of it than he
has to-day. Still, as far as the Law went, _Paterfamilias_ bossed the
show. The rest of the household--the wife, the child, the bullock, and
the slave--were all equally destitute of legal rights.
Legally, it would appear that family life in Rome ought for the head
of the household to have been a very happy affair indeed, if happiness
can, as some think, be attained by having all your own way. Socially
and morally, however, Roman wives and families gave the old man at home
quite a lot of trouble on occasion, and many merry things happened not
unworthy of modern Christian civilization.
Juvenal has a lot to say about Roman Woman that does not seem to prove
that she was altogether a down-trodden victim of Law.
’Tis night; yet hope no slumbers with your wife,
The nuptial bed is still the scene of strife;
There lives the keen debate, the clamorous brawl,
And quiet “never comes that comes to all.”
That has quite a modern homely ring about it, and we may rest assured,
I think, that no Law ever could or ever will restrain the right of Mrs.
Caudle to deliver her curtain lecture.
But whatever really went on in Roman households there is no doubt
about the Law, which is interesting to us inasmuch as it is one of
the forbears of our own Law. Roman Law ignored the existence of Woman
except as an appanage of her Lord and Master. He had rights in her, but
she had none in herself.
“Truth will leak out even in an affidavit,” and one must not in an
historical survey of this kind shut one’s eyes to the fact that some of
our Law is of Germanic origin. It came across to us in Saxon times, and
though no doubt we gave it the “Anglo” touch and turned it out a more
highly-manufactured article than we could have hoped for from the very
raw material we imported, still the tainted origin of it continues to
haunt us, and perhaps accounts for some of the harsh, unsatisfactory
nature of much of our Law.
The Saxons certainly treated Woman with greater respect than the Romans
had done. They considered Woman to have a special insight into the
mystery of things, and credited her with the gift of prophecy, and
treated her accordingly.
Although there was an attitude of tolerance in the Saxon treatment
of Woman, the law still regarded her as a chattel, as may be read in
the “Dooms” of Alfred and Ethelbert and other Saxon kings. For these
early legislators called their Statutes “Dooms,” and their Judges were
Doomsters or Deemsters, as they still are in our ancient Island of Man.
And throughout the Dooms you will find the patriarchal spirit strongly
asserting itself. The father was absolute master of his daughters and
sold them into wedlock. A maid or wife was regarded absolutely as an
article of property, in the one case of her father, in the other of her
husband. The ancient practice seems to have been to steal a wife first
and pay the price afterwards, but the Dooms regularized this and the
more legal and reasonable system of purchase took its place.
In early times the price of the maiden was fixed at so many head of
cattle and we read in a Saxon chronicle “A King shall with cattle buy
a Queen.” The form of the ceremony was outwardly much like our own,
so lovingly do we cling to the old forms long after their meaning has
departed. The father was there to give the bride away, the contracting
parties took each other by the hand and proclaimed themselves man and
wife. The lady’s friends were present and the father received the price
and handed over the bride. The lady was in fact what pleaders call
“goods sold and delivered”; so much so that if the husband discovered
any deceit or guile in the transaction then he could bring her home
again and have his money back.
Another interesting item in the ceremony was that the father delivered
the bride’s shoe to the bridegroom and he touched her on the head with
it to show that he assumed marital authority, and when the married
pair retired to rest the shoe was placed at the head of the bed on the
husband’s side. The shoe still plays a low comedy part in some modern
weddings but its symbolism is departed. The next morning if the husband
was satisfied with his wife he made her a _morgen-gifu_ or morning
gift, and from that moment he had no longer the right to return his
bride.
But what shocks and surprises one more than all the rest in these early
Saxon Laws is their complacency towards crime against Woman which seems
to have been the natural corollary of their assertion of her chattel
status. Strange things might be done for cash down in Saxon times, and
there was a tariff of crime by which, for forty shillings and costs,
you could have a feast of sin and wickedness such as you could not
purchase to-day under many years of penal servitude.
In nearly every place where woman is mentioned in the Dooms she is
mentioned as a thing rather than a person. In a Doom of Ethelbert it
was enacted, for instance, that “if a man carry off a maiden by force
let him pay fifty shillings to the owner, and afterwards buy the object
of his will from the owner.” It is further enacted that if the young
lady was already betrothed then the man who had carried her off had to
pay further compensation to the extent of another twenty shillings to
her original young man.
The import to us of the incidents of this transaction lies in the fact
that the only person who had no legal interest in the matter was the
poor maiden herself. Her owner got her price and a bit more for the
compulsory purchase, so to speak, on the same principle perhaps as a
railway pays more than the market price on the compulsory purchase of
land; the maiden’s young man got his bit to solace himself for his
disappointment and enable him to set up in life with his second best
girl; but, these payments being made, the world regarded the incident
as legally closed.
It is an extraordinary thing that this Saxon notion of marriage by
purchase got so firmly fixed into the heads of the populace by old
tradition that up to quite recent times there were men and women in the
country who believed that it was lawful for a man to sell his wife, and
there are many authentic instances of such sales in the last hundred
years.
The sale of the wife in Thomas Hardy’s _Mayor of Casterbridge_ was
drawn from the life. The traditional view seems to have been that if a
man brought his wife into the open market with a halter round her neck
and sold her to another man, that amounted to a divorce and the husband
was then entitled to marry again. Smithfield in London and New Cross in
Manchester were the scenes of many such sales.
In the North and the West Riding of Yorkshire the common people in the
early nineteenth century believed the law of selling a wife to be as
follows:
1. The same wife must not be sold more than once by the same husband.
2. The price of a wife must not be less than one shilling.
3. The wife must be delivered to her purchaser with a halter, if
possible a new halter, round her neck.
As late as the eighteenth century official sanction of a base sort was
given to such sales. On August 31, 1773, there is stated to be the
following entry in a Toll Book which seems to have been kept at the
Bell Inn, in Edgbaston: “August 31, 1773, Samuel Whitehouse of the
parish of Willenhall in the County of Stafford this day sold his wife
Mary Whitehouse in open market to Thomas Griffiths of Birmingham value
one shilling. To take with all faults.
Signed, Samuel Whitehouse,
Mary Whitehouse.
Voucher, Thomas Buckley of Birmingham.”
In 1816 a French visitor in a book entitled _Six Mois à Londres_,
under the piquant heading, “À quinze shillings ma femme,” gives an
entertaining account of what he saw with his own eyes at Smithfield
Market. “A seller soon presented himself,” he writes, “leading his wife
by a cord attached to her neck. Taking his stand he began to bawl: ‘À
quinze shillings ma femme! Qui veut ma femme pour quinze shillings?’
But all seemed in vain. Beefs, veals and muttons disappeared about
him but no one wanted a wife. The poor man became hoarse and was in
despair; at last an ‘amateur’ presented himself who began to examine
the wife, ‘comme il avait examinés quelques instans auparavant une
jument que je l’avais vu marchander.’ The inspection was favourable
and he offered the price demanded. The husband still repeated his
cries, ‘Pour tâcher d’attirer des enchérisseurs,’ but none appearing he
pocketed the money and the purchaser gave his arm to his new wife who
‘paraissait avoir de vingt à vingt deux ans et était assez jolie.’”
A ballad from a song book of 1818 confirms the Frenchman’s story. I
like it for its dramatic qualities and its happy ending, but it has
its social and historical value as showing that at the date of it
wife-selling was a sufficiently common thing to make a jesting song
about. To-day it would have little point.
THE BALLAD OF JOHN HOBBS.
A jolly shoemaker, John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
A jolly shoemaker, John Hobbs;
He married Jane Carter,
No damsel looked smarter,
But he caught a Tartar,
John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
Yes, he caught a Tartar, John Hobbs.
He tied a rope to her, John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
He tied a rope to her, John Hobbs;
To escape from hot water
To Smithfield he brought her,
But nobody bought her,
Jane Hobbs, Jane Hobbs,
They all were afraid of Jane Hobbs.
Oh! who’ll buy a wife? says Hobbs, John Hobbs,
A sweet pretty wife, says Hobbs;
But somehow they tell us
The wife-dealing fellows
Were all of them sellers,
John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
And none of them wanted Jane Hobbs.
The rope it was ready, John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
Come, give me the rope, says Hobbs,
I won’t stand to wrangle,
Myself I will strangle,
And hang dingle dangle,
John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
He hung dingle dangle, John Hobbs.
But down his wife cut him, John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
But down his wife cut him, John Hobbs;
With a few hubble bubbles,
They settled their troubles,
Like most married couples,
John Hobbs, John Hobbs,
Oh! happy shoemaker, John Hobbs.
Here is a case as late as 1872 in which the parties were in a better
station in life. It is quoted from a newspaper of July 6:--
“At the Exeter police court a smartly dressed woman applied for a
summons against her husband for refusing to maintain his children,
he having that morning turned them out of doors. Complainant and her
husband separated some time since, he selling her to another man for
£50 and agreeing to take two of the children and she the rest. Since
however he had sold her he had followed her about and annoyed her in
various ways and now he had turned the children he promised to support
out of doors and told her to keep the lot.
“In answer to the bench as to how she supported herself, she said she
received money from the man to whom she was sold. The bench thought
it was a most disgraceful case and that she did not deserve any
protection. If her husband threatened her violently and assaulted her
then they would grant her a summons.”
There is no serious suggestion that the wife was wronged in these
cases, on the contrary in nearly all of them she seems to have been a
consenting party and that was thought essential to the sale in modern
times. The interesting thing in the survival of these cases is that
the chattel theory of woman should be found existing in such a crude
form right into the later years of the Victorian Era.
The last authenticated case of which I have read occurred in a County
Court as late as 1881, where a woman gave evidence that she had been
married to another man, but she added: “He sold me for twenty-five
shillings, and I have it to show in black and white with a receipt
stamp on it, as I did not want people to say I was living in adultery.”
I have very little doubt this strange traditional belief in the right
of a man to sell his wife, is descended from the “Dooms,” wherein it
is laid down that if a freeman seduced the wife of a freeman he had to
pay, and in some cases “buy another wife for the injured husband and
deliver her at his house.”
That such a custom of selling wives should have existed down to the
present times, although only in holes and corners and among uneducated
people, is a matter of some surprise even to one like myself who
delights in tracing the forgotten folk-lore and fairy tale in the life
of to-day.
Certainly it goes to show how tenaciously the traditional legal view
of Woman as a chattel remains embedded in the English mind. “She is my
goods, my chattels,” bawls out Petruchio, and the groundlings applaud
this pithy statement of the English law. Nor can we justly add that the
degraded wife-sellers of the slums are the only people who are still
willing to throw the rope of tradition round the neck of womankind.
But alongside of “Dooms” and Statutes and legal ideals grew up
social and domestic ideals that had even a greater influence on the
position of Woman than could be expected from new and better laws. The
Saxons--ruffians as they were and are--had a higher ideal of family
life than the Romans, and in so far as our nation has been a success in
the world it has owed its progress to an extension of the Saxon ideal
of the family as the nucleus of the nation. The future of a race will
always, I think, depend on its home life, and the centre and guide of
the family is the wife and the mother.
Once this began to be recognized, although the legal position of Woman
remained unaltered, the social position of Woman and her power in
family affairs and society became practically assured. Ruskin has a
quaint thought for us about Shakespeare’s plays when he points out that
“the catastrophe of every play is brought about by the folly or fault
of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the virtue and wisdom
of a woman, and failing that there is none.” And that, I suppose, is
what experience found in the real dramas of family life.
In many ways Law may still regard Woman as an emancipated chattel,
but Man has long since ceased to hold that view, though there may be
occasional survivals of misconduct which go to show that traditional
laws and customs die hard.
The Law is always the latest of our public institutions to hear herald
messages of new social ideals. But there is onward movement even in
the Law. The present generation may hope to cut down the ancient,
twisted, gnarled outposts that fence the old Law from the hands of the
reformers, and to see a younger humanity laying a new foundation stone
of freedom and equality.