For example, the equal guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for financial support when financially competent, their equal control over the family life and their common pledge to the community of parental care--this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one.
At an Annual Meeting of the Uniform Laws Commission, at Cleveland, Ohio, Mrs.Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers.
As Mrs.McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a "Uniform Joint Guardianship Law." Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or less a negligible quantity.

The history of the family, however, proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in the business of rearing children is an immense asset to those children.
The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will toward their task.

Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call their own.
=Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.=--The second demand of child-life is for a competent mother--competent in health, that the baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength.

It is in those first years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the world at an advantageous point.

That many women are not competent physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many sources of inquiry.