Page:Women Wanted.djvu/384

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WOMEN WANTED

family has raised the whole scale of living for her and for her children. Yesterday her personality was merged and submerged in that of a husband to whose standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day she is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand and a personality of her own, as is likewise Elsa von Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine de Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to find them at last counted so that one and one in the marriage relation shall make two. When in this great world war, that autocracy with its divine right of kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall have been swept from the throne, there is another autocracy with its "divine" authority of one sex over the other that is going into the scrap heap of old systems.

Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of that ancient chrysalis of "coverture." Have you by chance yet met among your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name? Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr. Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But she has never ceased to be herself. "You call yourself Miss McArthur," a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, "and yet they say your cook tells that you are very respectable."

There are numbers of women like this in London