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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Kansas to municipal offices, and in the states where women may vote for school officers they are generally eligible to election to the office. Many of the states of the Union admit women to public office even though they refuse to them the ballot. A few of the strictly public offices now held by women in America are county recorder of deeds, assistant register of deeds, notary public, town clerk (Vermont), county clerk (Missouri), assistant clerk of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, receiver of public moneys in Mississippi, custodian of the Mississippi state capital, mayor of cities in Kansas, and all kinds of school offices. Many offices connected with the public charities are held by women in this country. Thus they are members of state boards of charities in Massachusetts and Connecticut, visitors, managers and trustees of reformatory and penal institutions, physicians, visitors and trustees of state insane hospitals, overseers of the poor, and police matrons. By act of Congress in 1870 the clerkships of the Executive Department of the United States Government were opened to women, who now make up a large percentage of the total number of government clerks.
In England women serve as poor-law guardians, visitors to and physicians in government hospitals and insane asylums, as assistant commissioners of the Labor Commission, and the position of meteorologist at the Government Observatory at Hong Kong is now held by a lady. In France women are members of the boards of education. In the Austrian provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina women have recently received appointments as government medical officers.
The political condition of woman to day may be briefly summed up thus: While she is not yet admitted to the full exercise of political rights, except in Wyoming and a few small islands, still she possesses very generally some right to vote upon local matters more or less closely affecting her as a citizen, and to hold many executive offices. Legislative and judicial offices are not as yet granted to women, except in a very few countries and states, and even where granted are not actually occupied by women.
IV. PERSONAL RIGHTS OF WOMEN.
With respect to the personal protection of woman by law, there has been a change for the better, as the dignity and sacredness of her person is more completely recognized. Severe punishments are inflicted for offenses against women, but still in many instances they are altogether too slight for the gravity of the offense. The “ age of consent,” which in many states was placed at the age of ten years, has been raised by very recent legislation to fourteen, sixteen, and in some states, eighteen years. For the better protection of women under arrest, police matrons have been placed in the station-houses of some of our American cities, to take charge of such women during the time of their detention. In New York and Massachusetts, by state legislation, all cities having a stated population must provide police matrons. Much of the recent labor legislation is in favor of women. The laws forbidding women to be employed about dangerous machinery, those requiring shopkeepers to provide seats for saleswomen, and the statutes requiring the appointment of women factory inspectors maybe cited. As to the law in many states prohibiting women from making a contract to work more hours a week than the time fixed by law, while by the same law a man is free to contract for as many hours’ labor as he chooses, one may question whether it does not really work an injustice, since, by interfering with her individual freedom to contract it places her at a disadvantage. An employer prefers to take an employe who is legally free to make agreements for extra work. Therefore, the woman’s wages are likely to be decreased and her opportunities for employment lessened by this restriction. A married woman is now protected from the violence of her husband by the legal right given her to prosecute him for assaults upon her. The old theory of the husband’s right to chastise his wife has disappeared from English and American law.
In the famous Jackson case in England the Lord Chief Justice, in setting free a