to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy;
as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight
causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed
infidelity. It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double
standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and
women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin.
Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of
which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary
rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism. Man,
on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the
straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve
something of importance in the world of thought or action.

This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in
preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for
their own best development and that of their children but has thrown
over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its
cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood.

=Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.=--When women as mothers
have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as
persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of
their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no
contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly
fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a
so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its
enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class. Any subject class
dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and
circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic
society. It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the
family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women
are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual
minority under the law to the individual responsibility and
self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to
contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the
affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of
government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body
politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day
the ideal of equal rights