The
future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be
protected. This is no more than the sub-human mother everywhere has as
her birthright, and however much this teaching may offend the common
male assumption that a wife is a form of property, the future certainly
holds within itself the establishment of this principle.
The question of divorce is so important that we must defer it to the
next chapter.
We have briefly alluded to the question of the wife's possession of
herself. We must now refer to the question, scarcely less important, of
her possession of her own property and her claims upon her husband's. It
is difficult for the present generation to realize that very few decades
have passed since the time when everything which a woman possessed
became, when she married, the property of her husband. That is now a
question which there is no need to discuss, but there remains a very
great issue, lately become prominent, and suggested by the popular
phrase, the endowment of motherhood.
We should obviously be false to our first principles if we did not
assent with all our hearts to the _fundamental_ principle expressed by
this phrase. If it is necessary that the wife be protected as a wife, it
is even more necessary that she be protected as a mother. There are
twelve hundred thousand widows in this country at the present time, and
of these a large number stand in unaided parental relation to a great
multitude of children.
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