n.

It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters of
law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuable
because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
new consideration and regard.

In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusive
of his wife. In America, violence against women was, from the first, an
unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, as
we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.

But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in the
old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
exactly as it had been under the English common law.

No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placing
women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
oppressive to women have just happened--just grown up like weeds out of
neglected soil.

Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill into
the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
completely her husband's property that he is responsible for her
behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamed
of as a State.

Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
married woman had