ry with it
the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the
wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to
be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only
when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her
husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or
"her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or
mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support
and maintenance of minor children."

The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either
invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of
other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to
court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended
from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to
supply the children's needs.

In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the
husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong
movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of
automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if
carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one
shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in
itself would make some confusion in cases where international
marriages give separate national interest.

In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the
interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as
of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of
social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call
women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex,
and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry.

In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity,
men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States,
at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and
a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which
of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the
two can do more toward family support.

The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her
in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in
some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that
excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affe