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 "status of being an infant, lunatic, or married woman." And there you are.

It was from that predicament that the earliest woman's rights' associations sought to extricate the woman who had taken the wedding veil and ring. Susan B. Anthony's first most famous achievement back in the sixties was a law establishing the right of a married woman in New York State to the ownership of her own clothes! By specific enactments since then, one and another of the rights to which other human beings are naturally born have been bestowed on married women. The most clearly defined of these, and the most widely recognised at last, are the right to their separate property and the right to their own earnings, which prevails in most of the United States. The Married Women's Property Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 14 years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall and the Société l'Avant Courriere in 1907 at last secured the law giving to the married woman the free disposition of her salary. But these concessions it is not easy to disentangle from that basic notion, which is warp and woof of the whole fabric of law, that a married woman has passed under the guardianship of her husband.

For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, "separate property" to ensure her title to it, must be specially secured to her by an antenuptial contract. In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they remain in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them in bonds, provided first she either makes affidavit