rofession is
closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
Tennessee, and South Carolina.

In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
they provide for their brothers.

Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
women to post-graduate courses.

You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county
superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In
Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of
medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
with a woman doctor.

Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.

In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.

In all the other States and territories children belong to their
fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no
one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.

It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are
growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.

The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
divorce her husband, so she took her childre