cil. So far as she was aware, father,
and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night when
the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
_to cut every one of those laws out of the book_.

The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As Elizabeth
Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
revising the rest.

Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governing
men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
does not stand the test of impartial examination.

In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and the
wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours? Are
the children yours? If you are the average fond American husband, you
will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are _ours_."

This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderly
cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
connected with that word "ours."

In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,--a man, his wife, and several
half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks.

One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he told
his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
take possession of the boarding house.

"But it is mine," pr