If her protected position more or less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the Married Women's Property Act in England, which make her not liable to imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be "responsible" before the law? For any woman, though not yet married, is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice of law in America has been by the slow process of an "enabling act" from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly entitled "A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors."
There is still another "disability" which is causing to-day perhaps the most world wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had thereby
