f their own property, and women's
legal disabilities were, in every respect, much the same in the
United States as in the mother country. Now, however, so great and
rapid has been the change of public opinion in this direction in
America, that in some of the States married women may not only
possess and inherit property over which their husbands have no
control, but their personal earnings have been so secured to them
that neither their husbands nor their husbands' creditors can touch
them; while at the same time, strange to say, their husbands are
still liable for their support, and answerable for any debts they
may contract, and men must pay these independent ladies' milliners'
bills, if all these additional _rights_ have not brought with them
some additional sense of justice, honesty, and old-fashioned right
and wrong.

This amazing consideration for the property claims of women is not,
however, without its possible advantages for the magnanimous sex
bestowing it; and unprincipled speculators, gamblers, in pursuits
calling themselves business, but in reality mere games of chance,
may now secure themselves from the ruin they deserve, and have
incurred, by settling upon their wives large sums of money, or
estates, which, by virtue of the women's independent legal tenure of
property, effectually enable their husbands to baffle the claims of
their creditors. Every use has its abuse. The melancholy process of
divorce, by which an insupportable yoke may be dissolved with the
sanction of the law, is achieved in America with a facility and upon
grounds inadmissible for that purpose in England. Pennsylvania has
long followed the German practice in this particular, allowing
divorce, in cases of non-cohabitation for a space of two years, to
either party claiming it upon those grounds; in some of the Western
States the ease with which divorces are obtained is untrammeled by
any condition but that of a sufficient term of residence, often a
very brief one, within the State jurisdiction.

Women lecture upon all imaginable subjects, and are listened to,
whether treating of the right of their sex to the franchise, or the
more unapproachable theme of its degraded misery in the public
prostitution legally practiced in all the cities of this great New
World, or the frantic vagaries of their the