LEGAL POSITION OF WOMEN. 249 



expounded it to your wife, on your fishing excursion, has 

 been somewhat modified. Wives have been given a status 

 by modern legislation ; and a woman, by becoming a wife, 

 does not now cease to be a legal entity. The law permits 

 her to retain and control her property irrespective of her 

 husband, and she has, therefore, thus far, ceased to be 

 'nobody.' But my private opinion is, that, as a general 

 thing, the women of this country get along very well, even 

 under the pressure of the ' barbarisms ' of which you speak. 

 They manage, one way and another, to get the upper hand 

 of their legal lords, law or no law. If their existence, in 

 the light of authority, is 'less than a legal fiction,' they 

 come to be regarded, or make themselves felt in the world 

 as practical facts. They are quite as apt to be at the 

 top, as at the bottom of the ladder, notwithstanding what 

 'BLACKSTONE says' about their legal position. There is, 

 doubtless, a good deal of abuse of authority on the part 

 of husbands, but the women get their slj^re of the good 

 that is going in the world, as a general thing. If the 

 law is against them, they manage to usurp full an even 

 amount of privilege and authority, and keep along about 

 in line with the other sex. I never knew an out and out 

 controversy between a man and his wife, in which the 

 former did not get the worst of it in the end; and as to 

 the impositions, which as a melancholy truth are too fre- 

 quent, they are about as much on one side as the other. 

 It is not to legal enactments that we must look for the 

 cure of unhappiness incident to the married state, but 



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