MARRIED WOMEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 139, 13 June 1936, Page 3 (Supplement)

MARRIED WOMEN.

EFFECT OF THE LAW.

INEQUALITIES AND DISABILITIES

(By M. B. SOL.TAK.)

It would seem that women have to pay a high price for such advantages as marriage bestows; from time to time some special circumstance gives evidence of some major or minor disability which spinsters are spared. For instance, it needed the Dominion's participation in the world war to bring home to some New Zealand women that marriage to an alien placed them more or less without the law. Had it not been overshadowed by more tragic and sensational happenings of that period the ordeal of prosecution, fines and threats of imprisonment for non-registration as aliens, loss of civil rights, and other onerous restrictions imposed on British-born women citizens of this Dominion who came under the operations of the law because, through their marriage, they were regarded as aliens, would have stirred the community to some form of protest.

As it was, the sporadic efforts of women's societies to have the law amended through Imperial conferences and other cumbersome machinery proved futile. There has since been little progress made in spite of the ponderous deliberations of world-important gatherings such as the Hague Convention. Other countries —some small and relatively backward in other respects—have long since granted full freedom to women in this matter of nationality, but it would seem that the rulers of women's destiny in the greater States are determined not to yield. No Relief Under Present Law. As far as New Zealand is concerned the deplorable fact remains that women who suffered during the war because of their enforced national status have gained no relief under the recent local ameliorative legislation regarding nationality of married women. They still retain the foreign status of their husband, and stand to experience again the ordeal they were put to during the war should such a set of circumstance? again arise. Indeed, they need not wait for the outbreak of war to be made aware once more of what the law can do; the granting of a passport which gives to the fully qualified citizen the protection and assistance of His Majesty's representatives abroad, leave? the wife of an alien (though she herself be born of British parents) without this

assurance. For it is made plain in the passport regulations that she can claim these "not as a right but merely as a courtesy." 111 such a time as the present when more than half the overseas countries are in a state of mutual aggression and internal conflict, a woman holding such a passport may fall a victim to foreign antagonism and find herself without the protection available to her more fortunate fellow-citizens.

No law-abiding New Zealander should be placed in such a position of danger and disadvantage while legislation can be devised to grant security. The Dominion has been offered the opportunity to co-ordinate with Great Britain and the other States of the British Commonwealth in overcoming this grave omission, but so far 110 means of securing combined action has been found. This is the kind of thing which make the protagonists of feminine emancipation, with their passion for speedy action, impatient with existent machinery of Government. The best of politicians are prone to allow women to remain an after thought and to oppose complete emancipation for