THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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These women know when to make a written contract and when a verbal one will be binding; they never sign a paper without understanding exactly its purport in all its bearings, and never give unlimited power of attorney to an agent. That so many women are disqualified for ordinary business transactions requiring exactness and judgment is not so much because of mental incompetence as lack of training.
Rastus S. Ransom, Surrogate of New York County, in an article in the North American Review , June, 1893, “ How to Check Testamentary Litigation,” makes some unwelcome statements about women. He says: ‘‘Manywomen are named as execu- tresses of wills, and it is my experience that they know little or nothing of business, rely largely upon their emotions and intuitions, and fall an easy prey to the ever-ready and always convenient sharper. My judgment is that women should never be compelled or permitted to undergo the labor and responsibility of these positions.”
It is only fair to assume that Mr. Ransom, in giving expression to an opinion of this sort, is not speaking from prejudice of the sex, but is givinghis honest convictions founded upon association and experience. It is a matter of record that all the property of the United States passes through the probate courts once in thirty years. By the appointment of persons largely interested as administrators or executors the percentage allowed for such services is saved to the estate. Now if women are to be debarred from acting in such capacity because of incompetence much that would come to them from this source must go to strangers. This state of affairs is certainly deplorable and must result in loss to women, whether they do or do not act as execu- tresses of the estates in which they are chiefly interested.
One more quotation from the same paper: “ Many intelligent persons do not realize the absolute right both in morals and in law of a man to dispose of all his property in his lifetime, to take effect only at his death, and which is defined to be his last will and testament. His right so to dispose of his property is as certain and sacred as his right to dispose of it by sale or gift during his life.”
Embodied within this declaration of the law, as made by Mr. Ransom, there are many perplexing questions that are intimately connected with the rights and interests of women, especially wives. Believing that one instance drawn from actual observation is more valuable than a dozen hypothetical cases, I will take one under my notice at the present time to illustrate this absolute right of man, both in a legal and moral sense, that Mr. Ransom so emphatically proclaims and so fearlessly maintains to be just and even sacred.
Mr. S, living a short distance from my home in Davenport, Iowa, owns four acres of land on which he is now living with his wife. Every dollar that was paid for this property, which is valued at $1,500, was earned by the wife, who is now in the neighborhood of sixty-five years of age and partially crippled from an accident. At present she works in the fields, makes the garden, milks the cows and makes the butter; she harnesses her own horse, drives to town and sells her chickens, vegetables, butter and eggs, buttermilk and smearkase, and takes home, when she can get them, chairs to re-seat at odd moments, besides, in cases of illness in the neighborhood, acting as nurse. The husband, too fine a gentleman for this sort of work, leads a life of comparatively luxurious ease, and never contributes a dime to the domestic treasury.
Now Mr. S has, unquestionably, the legal right, and according to Mr. Surrogate Ransom the moral, to make a will disposing of, in any way to suit himself, all but one- third of this property at his death. If he should not survive his wife, whether he makes a will or not the court would take possession of this property, and from what is left after the settlement of the estate the wife would receive one-third; the balance would go to the eight grown children all away from home.
That so many men are better than this infamous law is the only reason that it is permitted to disgrace the statute books in so many of our states today. In all our broad land there is only one state, and that is California, that has righteously considered the wife in the disposition of property.
Respect for the law has so long been considered one of the cardinal virtues, that
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