. The transaction was
perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California.
In that State community property may even be given away, without the
wife's knowledge or consent.

It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned
in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.

This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience
of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
not afford it at all.

It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work.
They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work eleven
hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and
collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even if
the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. The
right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protected
in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husband
is entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_.

I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not, unless
among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her,
he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
nevertheless.

The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she known
it, selected the country to which most American women owe their legal
disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
state was a military organization, and every man was a fight