University of Virginia Library

Mother and Child.

The slowness with which some of the worst inequalities in the
laws are corrected shows the unsatisfactoriness of the indirect way.
In most states, a married mother has literally no legal rights over
her own children, so long as she and her husband live together.
Here is a case which actually happened, and which might happen
today, in 31 out of the 48 states of the Union:

A Chinaman had married a respectable Irishwoman. When their
first baby was three days old, the husband gave it to his brother
to be taken to China and brought up there. The mother, through
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, appealed to
the courts. But the Judge promptly decided that the husband was
within his rights. He was the sole legal owner of the baby he had
the sole legal right to say what should be done with it. For more

than half a century, the suffragists of the United States have been
trying to secure legislation making the father and mother joint guardians
of their children by law, as they are by nature; but thus far
the equal guardianship law has been obtained in only 16 states and
the District of Columbia. Massachusetts got it in 1902, after 55 years
of effort by Massachusetts women. In Colorado, after women were
given the right to vote, the very next Legislature passed an equal
guardianship law.

Massachusetts, the State Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's
Relief Corps, the State W. C. T. U., the Children's Friend Society
and 65 other associations united in asking for the bill. The
only society of women that has ever ranged itself definitely on the
wrong side of this question is the "Massachusetts Association Opposed
to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women." It circulated
for years, under its official imprint, a leaflet in defense of the
old law which gave the husband the sole control of the children.

In Massachusetts, in 1902, the laws of inheritance between husband
and wife were made equal; but it had taken more than half a century
of work to secure this self-evidently just measure. The experience
in many other states has been similar. The roundabout way is almost
always long and slow.