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382 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1917
"We women," the sheriff's wife said, "we are an unhappy and subjugated half of mankind. Men make the laws; we women have no influence on this. But can any man imagine what it means to a woman to have a child? Has he experienced the anxiety, has he felt the excruciating pain and woe and screams? In this case, a maid has had a child. She is unmarried, so she is supposed to bear this child in her body while trying to hide it. Why hide it? Because of society. Society has contempt for the unmarried woman who is pregnant. Not only does it not protect her, it persecutes her with contempt and shame. Isn't that awful? It is enough to infuriate any person with a beating heart. The young woman is not only going to bring a child into the world, which may seem bad enough, but she is also to be treated as a criminal because of it. I venture to say that it was sheer luck that this young woman sitting here in the dock, that her child accidentally was born in that creek and drowned. It was fortunate both for her and the child. As long as society is the way it is, no unmarried mother should be punished, even if she killed her child."The above is a less than subtle message to the reader that role of women needs to be improved. This impresses me as a quite enlightened point of view for the time in which it was written.