e to
bear children or to surrender to her husband, without censure, and often
without the knowledge of the world. If she be addicted to drunkenness,
people will divine that her husband must have treated her brutally; if
she be seen with other men, folks suspect that he neglects her.

If her husband seeks satisfaction for his desires elsewhere, she may
divorce him and secure alimony; if he deserts her the law will return
him to her side, if it can find him. If he fails to bring home the
wherewithall to provide for her, she may have him sent to jail. If she
discovers that he is getting the affection and the sex life which she
has denied him, outside of his home, and if she buys a revolver and
murders him in cold blood, the jury will exonerate her.

If a wife deserts her husband and her children, the law does not make
her a criminal; for wife abandonment, the husband is held criminally
liable.

No matter what the offense of the woman, custom and public opinion
demand that every "decent" man permit his wife to accuse him on "just
grounds" and to secure the divorce and call on the law to force him to
pay her alimony for the rest of their natural lives.

No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be
exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation,
legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the
jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. She has only to say that he
"deceived her."

A husband may become crippled or invalided and there is no law even
suggesting that it is the duty of his wife to support him; most
communities would lynch a man who neglected a sick or helpless wife, and
the law would certainly deal most harshly with him. The law throws no
safeguards about the man, to protect him against his wife's failure to
live up to her theoretical marital obligations, to protect him when he
is ill, or in the enjoyment of separate maintenance, alimony, or against
non-support or abandonment.

The laws today protect the owners of property and the economically
powerful. The more economic power a group, or a class, or a sex
possesses, the more the state throws the mantle of its protective laws
about it. Women are owners of a commodity for which men are buyers or
barterers, and our modern laws protect woman at the expense of man.

In his "Origin of the Family," Engels says:

"The supremacy of man in marriage is simply the consequence of his
economic superio