Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/666

648 order. The common law "merged the married woman's whole legal being in that of her husband." She might be heir to untold wealth; marriage made her husband legal owner of it all, with unchecked power over it, as well as over her expenses. She might be a Minerva of wisdom, but her every action must be obedient to her husband, though he were little above the idiot. She might be mother of a score of children, but her husband could will them all away from her control, even the unborn babe he should never behold. In short, she might be or do anything; her husband still had full power over her body, her actions, her property, her earnings, and her children. But, on the other hand, he was responsible for her crimes, her debts, her support, her protection from violence, and the support and protection of her children. If he could legally "correct her with a stick no bigger than his thumb," and that not with "cruelty," he must also answer by his own payment, or imprisonment, for her misdeeds, as for a minor child's. Thus was the monogamic unity of the family secured by the strong domestic control of a father-head, just as the organic unity of society was secured by the strong political control of an unlimited monarchy. And no doubt both forms of despotism have been necessary in the appropriate stages of human development. But, at the time our republic was born, it had become apparent to the dullest, as it had long been to prophetic minds, that the hour had arrived when political control must concern itself not only with its first great task, viz., the development of social order, but must set itself at work also on its second great effort, viz., the definition and defense of personal rights inside of this social order. Not only this, but it became apparent that the domestic order also contained within itself necessities for like definition and defense of personal rights. The tendency thus inaugurated naturally took shape first, in its relation to married women, in an increase of secured independence of personal action, and of parental control, to women cruelly abused or divorced or deserted by their husbands. It began to be seen that the wives of bad or incompetent men should not be the domestic slaves of those men. It began to be seen that the children of bad or incompetent fathers should have the protection and support he failed to give them provided by the other parent, who to that end should be endowed with certain powers of ownership of property and person. And, as legislators had their attention drawn to these truths by concrete illustrations of abuses, by husbands and fathers, of the law which gave them absolute power over wife and children, they tried to alter the law in one and another particular. Hence we find the old "common law," in the different States of our Union, with its darker spots torn out and patched over with new readings to such a degree that, in many cases, the original fabric is hardly distinguishable. A brief summary of these tearings out and patchings over will enable us to see the drift of legal changes respecting the matter in hand.

The common law recognized no legal right as inhering in the