Page:Women Wanted.djvu/408

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WOMEN WANTED

erture, and put it in a glass case for future generations to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the marriage contract be rewritten with a really free hand.

How it will be done all over the world, we even at present may prophesy. See already Scandinavia. The northern sky was alight with the forecast of woman's freedom, even before this war broke. Contemporaneously with the enfranchisement of women up there, completed in Denmark only in 1915, almost the first act of governments in which all of the people were for the first time represented, was to appoint a marriage commission. On it are both men and women from the three lands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the marriage laws. The task is not completed. But there are important sections of the new code ready: they have taken the "obey" out of the marriage service; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual consent, that is by request of the parties interested, who are to be let out of wedlock as simply and as easily as they were let in. Further personal rights and property rights are all being defined and arranged on the new basis of equality of morality and duty and responsibility and on the assumption that the wife is a separate personality from her husband.

The nearby country of Finland, where the woman movement has always kept step with Scandinavia, has also taken similar action. The Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to local authorities and other qualified bodies for suggestions on the subject of the reform of the marriage