ssion, at Cleveland,
Ohio, Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the
firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing
the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation
for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers.
As Mrs. McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides
being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook
County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the
largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she
could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of
mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a
"Uniform Joint Guardianship Law."

Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that
if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or
less a negligible quantity. The history of the family, however,
proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in
the business of rearing children is an immense asset to those
children.

The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care
may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will
toward their task. Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small
the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however
society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is
at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized
parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never
fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call
their own.

=Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.=--The second demand of
child-life is for a competent mother--competent in health, that the
baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household
skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the
baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward
physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. It is in those first
years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the
world at an advantageous point. That many women are not competent
physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many
sources of inquiry. The facts brought out in legislative hearings by
those urging support for the so-called "Maternity Bill" amply prove
this. Taking the figures for New York State alone, in the year 1920