Page:Women Wanted.djvu/385

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THE RING AND THE WOMAN
349

and in New York, who are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, "Let us at mature age take an adult title." Master Jones, you know, does not wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as "Mr." Jones. Fraulein is but a diminutive, "little Frau," a prefix of immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau, assured inquiring reporters: "Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why shouldn't I be? I have passed my 35th birthday." The Imperial Union of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the "unity title," they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is significance of wide changes.

She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law actually wrote her. down on the statute books as civiliter mortua, one "civilly dead," is about to be restored to the status of an individual. The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its slow way, is now at the sharpest turning.

The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the discriminations that have limited their human activities set free the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the previ-