is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often
enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are
so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
rights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.
But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.

Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other
forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado where
women vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
property rights of women.

In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now
fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.

The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings in
Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
Idaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights are
merely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.

Women to control their own business property must be registered as
traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.

Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.

[Illustration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]

There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States
every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
Georgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they
are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman
must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her
living.

If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you
are barred from seven of the United States. The legal p