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CONCERNING 
 
 WOMEN 
 
CONCERNING 
 
 WOMEN 
 
 by 
 
 SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE 
 
 ALBERT & CHARLES BONI 
 NEW YORK 1926 
 
Copyright, 1926, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. 
 
 Manufactured in the United States of America 
 
Ellen Winsor 
 
 and 
 
 Rebecca Winsor Evans 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I The Beginnings of Emancipation ... 1 
 
 II Woman’s Status, Past and Present ... 19 
 
 III Institutional Marriage and Its Economic 
 
 Aspects 56 
 
 IV Woman and Marriage . . * 93 
 
 ^ The Economic Position of Women . . . 157 
 
 VI What is to be Done 207 
 
 VII Signs of Promise 
 
 . 270 
 
CONCERNING 
 
 WOMEN 
 
Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and 
 the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into 
 their proper places. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecraft. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION 
 
 It will be foolish to assume that women are free, 
 until books about them shall have ceased to have 
 more than an antiquarian interest. All such books, 
 including this one, imply by their existence that 
 women may be regarded as a class in society; that 
 they have in common certain characteristics, con- 
 ditions or disabilities which, predominating over 
 their individual variations, warrant grouping them 
 on the basis of sex. No such assumption about 
 men would be thinkable. Certain masculine quali- 
 ties, so-called, may be singled out by amateur psy- 
 chologists and opposed to certain feminine quali- 
 ties, so-called; but from books about the sphere of 
 man, the rights of man, the intelligence of man, 
 the psychology of man, the soul of man, our shelves 
 are mercifully free. Such books may one day ap- 
 pear, but when they do it will mean that society has 
 passed from its present state through a state of sex- 
 
2 Concerning Women 
 
 equality and into a state of female domination. In 
 that day, in place of the edifying spectacle of men 
 proclaiming that woman is useful only as a bearer 
 of children, society may behold the equally edifying 
 spectacle of women proclaiming that man is useful 
 only as a begetter of children; since it seems to be 
 characteristic of the dominant sex to regard the 
 other sex chiefly as a source of pleasure and as a 
 means of reproduction. It seems also to be char- 
 acteristic of the dominant sex — I judge from the 
 world’s experience during the domination of men — 
 to regard itself as humanity, and the other sex as 
 a class of somewhat lower beings created by Provi- 
 dence for its convenience and enjoyment; just as 
 it is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an 
 aristocracy, to regard the lower classes as being 
 created solely for the purpose of supporting its 
 power and doing its will. When once a social or- 
 der is well established, no matter what injustice it 
 involves, those who occupy a position of advantage 
 are not long in coming to believe that it is the only 
 possible and reasonable order, and imposing their be- 
 lief, by force if necessary, on those whom circum- 
 stances have placed in their power. There is noth- 
 ing more innately human than the tendency to 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 3 
 
 transmute what has become customary into what 
 has been divinely ordained. 
 
 Thus among the Hebrews the subordination of 
 woman gave rise to the notion that she was fash- 
 ioned out of man’s rib. She was the result of a 
 divine afterthought, the sexus sequior of the ancients 
 and more recently of Schopenhauer, “inferior in 
 every respect to the first.” Since the Divine Artist 
 had had good practice in creating Adam, it might 
 logically have been expected that His second sex 
 would turn out even better than His first; we must 
 therefore lay His failure to the somewhat sketchy 
 nature of the materials He chose to work with. 
 This Hebrew myth of the creation of woman has 
 had considerable effect on her status in the era 
 known as Christian. Being “only a supernumerary 
 bone,” as Bossuet reminded her, she could naturally 
 not aspire to a position of equality with man. She 
 must remember her origin, and be humble and sub- 
 servient as befitted a mere rib. 
 
 She was humble and subservient, as a matter of 
 fact, for an incredibly long time; so long that there 
 exists a general suspicion even at the present day 
 that there is something in her nature which makes 
 her want to be subject to man and to live as it were 
 
4 Concerning Women 
 
 at second hand. This thought would be even more 
 alarming than it is, perhaps, if it were not true that 
 men themselves have stood for a good deal of subjec- 
 tion during the world’s known history. Chattel 
 slavery and serfdom were abolished from the civil- 
 ized world only at about the time that the subjection 
 of women began to be modified; and men still en- 
 dure, not only with resignation but with positive 
 cheerfulness, a high degree of industrial and politi- 
 cal slavery. The man who is entirely dependent 
 for his livelihood upon the will of an employer is an 
 industrial slave, and the man who may be drafted 
 into an army and made to fight and perhaps die for 
 a cause in which he can have no possible interest is 
 the slave of the State; yet one can not see that this 
 proves Aristotle’s assumption that there are free na- 
 tures and slave natures, any more than the subjection 
 of women proves that they want to be subjected. 
 What the slavery of men, as of women, implies is 
 the existence of an economic and social order that is 
 inimical to their interests as human beings; and it 
 implies nothing more than this. 
 
 Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of 
 women which still finds expression in this country 
 and in Europe, prove anything more than that super- 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 5 
 
 stitious addiction to custom of which I have already 
 spoken. Those anxious critics who protest that 
 women have got more freedom than is good for So- 
 ciety make the mistake of supposing that Society can 
 exist only if its organization remains unchanged. 
 The same conservatism has opposed all the revo- 
 lutionary adaptations which have fitted the social 
 order to the breakdown of old forms and their re- 
 placement by new ones. Yet when the need for 
 such adaptations ceases, the growth of the social 
 organism ceases with it, and we have such a spec- 
 tacle of arrested development as the civilization of 
 India presents. Society, in so far as it has become 
 organic, is governed by the same rules as any other 
 organism: the condition of its health is growth, and 
 growth is change. 
 
 ^Ceytainly the present tendency of woman to as- 
 sume a position of equality with man involves, and 
 will continue even more to involve, profound psychic 
 and material readjustments. But to assume that 
 such readjustments will injure or destroy Society 
 is to adopt toward Society an attitude of philosoph- 
 ical realism, to attribute to it a personality, to sup- 
 pose that it is equally capable of destruction with the 
 individual, and that it may in some mystical way 
 
6 Concerning Women 
 
 derive benefit from the sacrifice of the individual’s 
 best interests. But what is Society save an aggre- 
 gation of individuals, half male, half female? 
 Where you have a handful of people forming a com- 
 munity, there you have Society; and if the individ- 
 uals are enlightened and humane it may be called 
 a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal 
 it will be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” 
 may be promoted by the enslavement of one-half its 
 members, is unreasonable. One may be permitted 
 the doubtful assumption that this enslavement pro- 
 motes the welfare of the other half of Society, but it 
 is obvious that it can not promote the welfare of the 
 whole, unless we assume that slavery is beneficial to 
 the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the 
 slaves have been women). When we consider the 
 political organization known as the State, we have a 
 different matter. The State always represents the 
 organized interest of a dominant class ; therefore the 
 subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the 
 State, and their emancipation may be opposed as a 
 danger to the State. 
 
 It is evident from the very nature of the State 1 
 
 1 For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of the 
 State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise on 
 the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 7 
 
 that its interests are opposed to those of Society ; and 
 while the complete emancipation of women, as I 
 shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the de- 
 struction of the State, since it must accrue from the 
 emancipation of other subject classes, their emanci- 
 pation, far from destroying Society, must be of ines- 
 timable benefit to it. '(Those critics, and there are 
 many, who argue that women must submit to re- 
 strictions upon their freedom for the good of the 
 State, as well as those advocates of woman’s rights 
 who argue that women must be emancipated for the 
 good of the State, simply fail to make this vital 
 distinction between the State and Society; and 
 their failure to do so is one of the potent reasons 
 why the nonsense that has been written about 
 women is limited only by the literature of the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from this 
 
 sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to 
 perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class 
 and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization 
 of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its 
 economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when 
 the conquering class has become merely an y owning class, the State is 
 an organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth, 
 for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless 
 classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The 
 State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the 
 owning class. 
 
8 Concerning Women 
 
 standpoint centre in the function of childbearing^ 
 therefore it should be noted that the emphasis which 
 is placed on this function by the interest of the State 
 is quite different from the emphasis that would be 
 placed upon it by the interest of Society; for the 
 interest of the State is numerical, while the interest 
 of Society is qualitative. The State requires as 
 many subjects as possible, both as labour-motors 
 and as fighters. The interest of Society, on the 
 other hand, is the interest of civilization: if a com- 
 munity is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is 
 necessary not that the individuals who compose it 
 shall be as numerous as possible, but that they shall 
 be as wholesome and intelligent as possible. fTn 
 general, the interest of the State is promoted by the 
 number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality 
 of its members?^ 
 
 The interest of the State in this respect has been 
 most concisely expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” 
 said he, “shall be trained for war, and woman for 
 the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly ”J 
 and if one accept his premises he is exactly right. 
 But there have been many writers on women who 
 have not accepted his premises — not at least with- 
 out qualification — and who have yet failed to ob- 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 9 
 
 serve the antithesis between the interest which the 
 State has, and the interest which Society has, in 
 the question of population. Hence, mingled with 
 the voices of those critics who have demanded the 
 subjection of woman for the sake of children, have 
 been the voices of other critics demanding her em- 
 ancipation for the sake of children: and both these 
 schools of critics have overlooked her claim to free- 
 dom on her own behalf, (it is for the sake of human- 
 ity, and not for the sake of children, that women 
 ought to have equal status with mdD That chil- 
 dren will gain enormously by the change is true ; but 
 this is beside the issue, which is justice. 
 
 The argument that woman must be free for the 
 sake of the race, is an argument of expediency; as 
 nine-tenths of the arguments against her legal sub- 
 jection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfor- 
 tunately, humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the 
 claims of justice, especially when they conflict with 
 established abuses, unless these claims are backed 
 by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of 
 necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made 
 the social recognition of woman’s claims a necessity, 
 and their political recognition a matter of expe- 
 diency. Otherwise she would have to wait much 
 
io Concerning Women 
 
 longer for the establishment of her rights as man’s 
 equal than now appears likely, fin the Western 
 world her battle is very largely won; full equality, 
 social, industrial and legal, seems to be only a matter 
 of time and tactics. This she owes to the great 
 political and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 The conscious movement towards freedom for 
 women may be said to have originated in the great 
 emancipatory movement which found expression in 
 the American and French revolutions^ The revolu- 
 tionists did not succeed in establishing human 
 freedom ; they poured the new wine of belief in equal 
 rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for 
 some; and it soured. But they did succeed in creat- 
 ing political forms which admitted, in theory at least, 
 the principle of equality. Their chief contribution 
 to progress was that they dramatically and power- 
 fully impressed the idea of liberty upon the minds 
 of men, and thus altered the whole course of human 
 thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A Vindica- 
 tion of the Rights of Women,” revolutionary though 
 it seemed in its day, was a perfectly natural and 
 logical application of this idea of liberty to the situa- 
 tion of her sex. This remarkable book may be said 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation n 
 
 to have marked the beginning of the conscious move- 
 ment towards the emancipation of women. 
 
 ^he unconscious movement was the outgrowth of 
 the revolution in industry, brought about by the in- 
 troduction of the machine. (Women had always 
 been industrial workers, but their work, after the 
 break-up of the gilds, was for the most part carried 
 on at home. When the factory supplanted the 
 family as the producing unit in society, the environ- 
 ment of women was altered ; and the change affected 
 not only those women who followed industry to the 
 factories, but also those who remained housewives, 
 for where these had before been required to per- 
 form, or at least to superintend, a large amount of 
 productive work, they now found their function, as 
 the family became a consuming unit, reduced to the 
 superintendence of expenditures and the operation 
 of the household machinery — a labour which was 
 increasingly lightened by the progress of invention. 
 With domestic conditions so changed, what was 
 more natural than that the daughters should go into 
 the factory; or, if the family were well-to-do, into 
 the schools, which were forced reluctantly to open 
 their doors to women? And what was more nat- 
 ural than that women, as their minds were developed 
 
12 Concerning Women 
 
 through education, should perceive the injustice and 
 humiliation of their position, and organize to de- 
 fend their right to recognition as human beings? 
 “If we dared,” says Stendhal, “we would give girls 
 the education of a slave. . . . Arm a man and then 
 continue to oppress him, and you will see that he 
 can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you 
 as soon as he can.” 
 
 Women in the factories and shops; women in the 
 schools — from this it was only a moment to their in- 
 vasion of the professions, and not a very long time 
 until they would be invading every field that had 
 been held the special province of men. This is the 
 great unconscious and unorganized woman’s move- 
 ment which has aroused such fear and resentment 
 among people who saw it without understanding it. 
 
 The organized movement may be regarded simply 
 as an attempt to get this changing relation of women 
 to their environment translated into the kind of law 
 that the eighteenth century had taught the world to 
 regard as just: law based on the theory of equal 
 rights for all human beings. The opposition that 
 the movement encountered offers ample testimony 
 to the fact that “acceptance in principle” is more 
 than a mere subterfuge of diplomats and politicians. 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 13 
 
 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resolutely 
 clung to the theory of equality, and as resolutely 
 opposed its logical application. This is not sur- 
 prising; most people, no doubt, when they espouse 
 human rights, make their own mental reservations 
 about the proper application of the word “human.” 
 Women had hardly been regarded as human in me- 
 diaeval Europe; they were considered something a 
 little more from the chivalrous point of view, and 
 something a little less from the more common, work- 
 aday standpoint. The shadow of this old super- 
 stition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it 
 is hardly surprising that the egalitarians of the 
 French Revolution excluded women from equal 
 political and legal rights with men; and that the 
 young American republic which had adopted the 
 Declaration of Independence, continued to sanction 
 the slavery of negroes and the subjection of women. 
 How firmly rooted this superstition was, may be 
 seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from 
 the writings of that great American advocate of 
 freedom, the author of the Declaration, Thomas 
 Jefferson. 
 
 Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its 
 
14 Concerning Women 
 
 inhabitants should meet together to transact all their 
 business, there would yet be excluded from their delib- 
 erations (1) infants until arrived at years of discre- 
 tion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of 
 morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promis- 
 cuously in the public meetings of men. (3) Slaves. 
 
 Thus does superstition cast out logic. Nor does 
 superstition die easily. The masculine assumption, 
 usually quite unconscious, that women are unfit for 
 freedom, bids fair to persevere as stubbornly as the 
 feminine assumption that marriage offers a legiti- 
 mate and established mode of extortion. 1 
 
 If the conscious feminists bore the brunt of the 
 resentment aroused by woman’s changing relation 
 to the world about her, it was because their oppo- 
 nents did them the honour of believing that they were 
 responsible for the change. It was a strangely 
 
 1 1 shall take up this question later ; but I might remark that this 
 point is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State of New 
 York. The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced 
 twenty years before, brought action against him for separation and 
 maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before 
 questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent 
 remarriage, her lawyer stated that she had never been in need of 
 money before, but that she had been swindled out of the money set- 
 tled upon her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The italics 
 are mine; and no comment, I think, is needed. 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 15 
 
 incurious attitude that permitted such an assump- 
 tion to be held ; for it really takes a very feeble ex- 
 ercise of intelligence to perceive that a handful of 
 feminist agitators could hardly coax millions of 
 women into industry — under conditions often ex- 
 tremely disadvantageous — into business, the schools 
 and the professions. I believe the cause of this in- 
 curiousness lay in the very fear aroused by these 
 changes and the social revaluations which they im- 
 plied; fear for a relation between the sexes which, 
 having been established for so long, seemed the 
 only reasonable, or indeed possible, relation. Filled 
 as they were with this fear of change, which is one 
 of the strongest human emotions, the opponents of 
 woman’s emancipation were incapable of objec- 
 tivity. Their intellectual curiosity was paralyzed. 
 This accounts, perhaps, for the utterances of two 
 such eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer and 
 Nietzsche. They came to the subject strongly preju- 
 diced: the idea of any claims on behalf of women 
 filled them with disgust; therefore, as one may take 
 a certain malicious pleasure in observing, their 
 thought on the subject was hampered by that “weak- 
 ness of the reasoning faculty” which Schopenhauer 
 found characteristic of women. If, when discuss- 
 
16 Concerning Women 
 
 ing woman, they had not been as “childish, frivolous 
 and short-sighted” as they believed women to be, 
 they might, along with lesser minds, have arrived at 
 some understanding of a subject which has always 
 been thought much more mysterious and baffling 
 than it really is. The woman of their day may 
 have been the poor creature they pronounced her to 
 be, but if she was, the obvious question was, Why? 
 Was she a poor creature by nature, or because of 
 centuries of adaptation to a certain kind of life? 
 This question neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche 
 took the trouble to ask. They weighed her as she 
 was — or as they thought she was — and arrived at 
 the sage conclusion that the West had much to 
 learn from the Orient concerning the proper atti- 
 tude toward her. 
 
 It would be a very desirable thing [says Schopen- 
 hauer] if this Number Two of the human race were in 
 Europe also relegated to their natural place [which he 
 conceives to be the harem of a polygamous household] 
 and an end put to this lady-nuisance, which not only 
 moves all Asia to laughter but would have been ridi- 
 culed by Greece and Rome as well. 
 
 Nietzsche, in the same vein, remarks that 
 
The Beginnings of Emancipation 17 
 
 a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and 
 has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of 
 severity and harshness, and easily confounded with 
 them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he 
 must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable 
 property, as a being predestined for service and accom- 
 plishing her mission therein. 
 
 Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves 
 nothing about women, but it proves a good deal 
 about the effect that their subjection has had on the 
 minds of men. It is a significant fact that both 
 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and 
 that in their day the status of women was lower in 
 Germany than in any other important country of 
 the Western World, except Italy. 
 
 (The corruption of both sexes that results from the 
 subjection of one, has been too convincingly dealt 
 with by other writers to need discussion hereT What 
 I should like to emphasize is the futility of ap- 
 proaching the so-called “woman question” with any 
 sort of pre-conceived notion concerning the nature 
 of woman, or her sphere, or her duty to the State or 
 to Society; and above all, of approaching it with 
 the idea — the idea that obsesses all reformers — that 
 she is a more or less passive creature about whom 
 
18 Concerning Women 
 
 something either ought or ought not to be done, or, 
 for that matter, about whom something can be done. 
 What she should and can do for herself is a differ- 
 ent matter; and to that question I intend to address 
 myself before I leave this subject. 
 
 i 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 woman’s status, past and present 
 
 I 
 
 Woman tends to assume a position of equality 
 with man only where the idea of property in human 
 beings has not yet arisen or where it has disap- 
 peared: that is to say, only in extremely primitive 
 or highly civilized communities, iln all the inter- 
 mediate stages of civilization, woman is in some 
 degree regarded as a purchasable commodity^ Her 
 status varies widely among different peoples: there 
 are primitive tribes where she holds a position of 
 comparative independence; and there are civilized 
 peoples, on the other hand, among whom she is vir- 
 tually a slave. But always there is present the idea 
 of subordination to a male owner, husband, father 
 or brother, even though it may survive only in cere- 
 monial observances, e. in the ritual practice of 
 “giving in marriage,” or in certain legal disabilities, 
 such, for instance, as the law entitling a man to his 
 wife’s services without remuneration. 
 
 The subjection of women, then, bears a close in- 
 
 19 
 
20 Concerning Women 
 
 trinsic resemblance to both chattel slavery and in- 
 dustrial slavery, in that its basis is economic . j As 
 soon as civilization advances to the point of a rudi- 
 mentary organization of agriculture and industry, 
 woman becomes valuable as a labour-motor and 
 a potential producer of children who will become 
 labour-motors and fighters. Her economic value, 
 or chattel-value, then, is a commodity for which her 
 family may demand payment; and hence, appar- 
 ently, arises the custom of exacting a bride-price 
 from the man who wishes to marry her. Once es- 
 tablished, this custom of barter in marriage strikes 
 root so deeply that the woman who has brought no 
 bride-price is often regarded with scorn and her 
 children considered illegitimate; and the idea of 
 male ownership that accompanies it becomes so 
 pronounced that it persists even where, owing to an 
 excess of women coupled with monogamy, the cus- 
 tom has been practically reversed, and the father 
 buys a husband for his daughter. An instance of 
 this survival is the system of dowry which exists in 
 France. Unless it is otherwise stipulated by pre- 
 nuptial agreement, the dowry is at the disposal of 
 the husband, and the wife, under the law, owes him 
 obedience. 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 21 
 
 When the bargain has been made and the bride 
 delivered to her husband’s family, her services gen- 
 erally become, save in tribes where residence is 
 matrilocal, the property of her purchasers, and she 
 is subject to her husband, or, where the patriarchal 
 system is highly developed, to the head of his tribe. 
 It must be remarked, however, that although this is 
 the usual arrangement, it is not invariable. Among 
 some peoples, the husband’s rights are purely sexual, 
 the services of the wife, and often even her children, 
 belonging to her own tribe; and among others, the 
 husband must pay for his bride in services which 
 render him for a long period the virtual slave of 
 his wife’s relatives. The point to be remarked in 
 all this is that any conception of woman as an in- 
 dividual entity, as in any sense belonging to her- 
 self, and not to her own relatives or to her husband 
 and his family, seems to be practically non-existent 
 among primitive peoples, as it was until recently 
 among civilized peoples. But it must be remarked, 
 too, that in this respect her position is only less 
 desirable than that of the man; for in primitive 
 society the group so dominates the individual that 
 in almost every phase of life he is hedged about with 
 restrictions and taboos which leave little room for 
 
22 Concerning Women 
 
 the play of personality and the pursuit of individual 
 desires. All social advancement has been in the 
 direction of the individual’s escape from this group- 
 tyranny. 
 
 So important is the part that the labour of women 
 plays in the primitive world, that the wife or wives 
 are often the sole support of husband and family; 
 and a man’s wealth and social prestige may actually 
 depend upon the number of his wives. “Manual 
 labour among savages,” says Westermarck, “is un- 
 dertaken chiefly by the women; and as there are no 
 day-labourers or persons who will work for hire, it 
 becomes necessary for any one who requires many 
 servants to have many wives.” { There are no day- 
 labourers or persons who will work for hire. 
 Women, then, are the first victims of that deep- 
 rooted and instinctive preference for living by the 
 labour of other people, which has played so moment 
 tous and sinister a role in the world’s history. 
 Among tribes whose mode of life has made them ex- 
 ploitable by stronger and more highly organized 
 hordes — as, for example, an agricultural people 
 which is conquered by a more mobile and disciplined 
 tribe of herders — there, among the expropriated 
 class, are day-labourers and people who will work 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 23 
 
 for hire, for these have no choice or alternative; but 
 among peoples where militant exploitation is im- 
 possible — as among the hunting-tribes — no man can 
 be forced to work for another man, for the simple 
 reason that there is no way of compelling him to 
 share the product of his labour. But even here we 
 see the economic phenomenon of the labour of women 
 being exploited as the labour of man is exploited 
 after conquest and the foundation of the exploiting 
 State; and this is the case chiefly because certain 
 natural disadvantages render them easily exploit- 
 able, as I shall show later. 
 
 It may be remarked in this connexion, that sex- 
 ual division of labour appears to be quite arbitrary 
 among primitive peoples; and that it often bears 
 little resemblance to the division which has existed 
 for so long among Europeans that it has apologists 
 who regard it as being divinely ordained . 1 This 
 suggests at least that the European division is ar- 
 bitrary too. Indeed, it has undergone considerable 
 change. Brewing, for example, was regarded as 
 woman’s work in mediaeval England. It is even 
 supposed that the monasteries, which excluded 
 
 1 Among the Chinese, for example, the woman never goes near the 
 kitchen. 
 
24 Concerning Women 
 
 women from other service within their walls, em- 
 ployed women brewers. In general, it appears a 
 fair conclusion that the occupations which are con- 
 sidered least desirable are given over to the sub- 
 ordinate sex. Thus men, according to the Vaer- 
 tings, during the period when women dominated in 
 Egypt, were forced to care for children and perform 
 the drudgery of the household. Where military en- 
 terprise plays a part in tribal life, the division of 
 labour appears to give validity to the contention of 
 Spencer and others that man is militant and woman 
 industrial ; yet the exclusion of women from military 
 activity is no doubt primarily due quite as much to 
 the taboos against them as to their own lack of war- 
 like spirit. Indeed, there are tribes where women 
 take active part in flighting ; and there are folk-tales 
 in plenty which tell of their prowess — as, for ex- 
 ample, in the epic lore of Greece and Russia. But 
 because of a primitive awe of the function of men- 
 struation, women are often considered unclean, and 
 excluded on this account from many tribal activities, 
 particularly from religious rites. Among such 
 peoples, it would not be surprising to find that the 
 same superstition excluded women from participa- 
 tion in any enterprise in which the tribal gods are 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 25 
 
 so active and their aid so important as in war. In 
 certain tribes of South Africa there is, according to 
 Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, a direct connexion between 
 militancy and a taboo against woman. man 
 sleeping with his wife must be careful not to touch 
 her with his right hand. Otherwise his strength as 
 a warrior goes from him and he will surely be 
 killed.” ") 
 
 Whatever be the basis of sexual division of la- 
 bour among different tribes, and whatever minor 
 differences there be in the relative position of the 
 sexes, one thing is certain, and it is all we are at 
 present concerned with, namely: in what Dr. Lowie 
 has called “that planless hodge-podge, that thing of 
 shreds and patches called civilization,” woman al- 
 most invariably occupies a more or less inferior 
 position. Dr. Lowie himself is careful to warn his 
 readers against the popular assumption that the 
 position of primitive woman is always abject, and 
 that the status of woman offers a sure index of cul- 
 tural advancement; nevertheless he says that “It 
 is true that in by far the majority of both primitive 
 and more complex cultures woman enjoys, if we ap- 
 ply our most advanced ethical standards, a less de- 
 sirable position than man.” 
 
26 Concerning Women 
 
 The obvious question is, Why? [ The answer is 
 equally obvious, and has been so often stated and 
 discussed that I need do no more than mention it 
 here. /Woman, however nearly her physical strength 
 in the natural state may approximate that of man, is 
 under a peculiar disadvantage in being the child- 
 bearing sex. During pregnancy, at least in its later 
 stages, and during childbirth, she is powerless to de- 
 fend herself against aggression. She is also at con- 
 siderable disadvantage during the early infancy of 
 her child. Man in the savage state, having none of 
 that consideration which proceeds in a rough ratio 
 with cultural development, takes advantage of her 
 periodic weakness and her consequent need of pro- 
 tection, to force her into a subordinate position. 
 Superstition, masculine jealousy and desire for 
 domination, have of course been joined with the 
 economic motive in bringing about this subjection 
 to the male; but these motives could not have oper- 
 ated if her subjection had not been physically pos- 
 sible. If woman had had the natural advantage 
 over man, she would have used it to subject him, 
 precisely as he used his advantage to subject her; 
 for the human being in the ruder stages exploits 
 other human beings, when possible, as a matter of 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 27 
 
 course, without any of those pretexts and indirec- 
 tions that characterize communities where the sense 
 of human rights has become sufficiently general to 
 gain the doubtful tribute of disingenuousness. It 
 is among these more enlightened communities that . 
 the subjection of woman — or of any class — becomes 
 reprehensible: a society that exploits human beings 
 through ignorant brutality is not open to the same 
 criticism as a society which continues to exploit 
 them when clearly aware that in doing so it is vi- 
 olating a natural right. 
 
 11 
 
 So much for the cause of woman’s subjection and 
 exploitation. It has had powerful abetment in 
 superstitious nations concerning sex, such as the 
 primitive horror of menstruation. “Even educated 
 Indians,” says Dr. Lowie, “have been known to re- 
 main under the sway of this sentiment, and its in- 
 fluence in moulding savage conceptions of the 
 female sex as a whole should not be underrated. 
 The monthly seclusion of women has been accepted 
 as a proof of their degradation in primitive com- 
 munities, but it is far more likely that the causal 
 sequence is to be reversed and that her exclusion 
 
28 Concerning Women 
 
 from certain spheres of activity and consequently 
 lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired 
 by the phenomena of periodicity.” 
 
 It is evident that this superstition has operated 
 powerfully to segregate women into a special class, 
 excluded from full and equal participation in the 
 life of the community. It is also reasonable to 
 assume that it has stimulated the growth of many 
 other superstitions that have hedged them about 
 from time immemorial. It is probably, for exam- 
 ple, closely connected with the Chinese association 
 of evil with the female principle of the Universe, 
 and with the Hebrew notion that sorrow entered 
 the world through the sin of a woman. No doubt 
 it may be connected with the mediaeval tend- 
 ency to regard woman as a mysterious and super- 
 natural being, either angelic or demoniac. The 
 conception of sibyls and witches is derived from it; 
 and likewise the notion which shows an interesting 
 persistence even now, that a good woman is some- 
 what nearer the angels than a good man, and a bad 
 woman much more satanic than a bad man . 1 Once 
 
 1 According to news-reports on the day that this is written, Judge 
 McIntyre of New York, sentencing a young woman in a criminal 
 case, said: “When a woman is bad she is vicious and worse than a 
 man, many, many times over.” 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 29 
 
 the idea is established that woman is a being extra- 
 human, minds prepossessed by this superstition 
 may see her as either subhuman or superhuman; or 
 these two notions may coexist, as in Christian so- 
 ciety. 
 
 The notion that there is always a savour of sin 
 in the indulgence of sexual appetite, even when ex- 
 ercised under due and formal regulation, has also 
 had a profound effect on the status of women. 
 This notion is to be found in both primitive and 
 civilized communities; and since to each sex the 
 other sex represents the means of gratifying sexual 
 desire, the other sex naturally comes, where such a 
 notion obtains, to represent temptation and sin. 
 But where one sex is dominant and tends to regard 
 itself as the sum of humanity, the other sex is forced 
 to bear alone the burden of responsibility for the 
 evil that sex represents; and it is therefore hedged 
 about by the dominant sex with all sorts of restric- 
 tions intended to reduce its opportunities to be 
 tempting, and thus to minimize its harmfulness. 
 
 It seems a fair assumption that the association 
 of sin with sex-desire may have arisen from the 
 antagonism between individual inclination and the 
 domination of the group. Among peoples where 
 
30 Concerning Women 
 
 the clan or the family is the final category, mar- 
 riage is far from being exclusively a matter of in- 
 dividual interest and preference ; indeed the individ- 
 uals concerned may have little or nothing to say 
 about it. The marriage is arranged by their elders, 
 and the principals may not even see one another 
 before their wedding day. Marriage under these 
 conditions is a contract between families, an ar- 
 rangement for founding a new economic unit and 
 for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are 
 purely dynastic arrangements in behalf of a politi- 
 cal order. Sexual preference can have little place 
 in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more inimical 
 to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threat- 
 ening the purely utilitarian basis upon which sex 
 has been placed; and as such it must be discount- 
 enanced, and young men and women carefully seg- 
 regated in order that this inconvenient sentiment 
 may have no chance to spring up unauthorized be- 
 tween them. 
 
 In the Christian world this association of sin 
 with the sexual appetite has prevailed since the days 
 of St. Paul . 1 Sexual desire has been regarded as a 
 
 1 It finds grotesque expression now and then. I remember seeing in 
 a San Francisco newspaper a few years ago this headline: “Accused 
 of having immoral relations with a woman other than his wife.” 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 31 
 
 base instinct, and its gratification under any cir- 
 cumstances as a kind of moral concession; there- 
 fore woman, as the instrument of sexual satisfaction 
 in the dominant male, must be repressed and regu- 
 lated accordingly, and to this end she was always 
 to be under obedience to some man, either her hus- 
 band or a male relative. “Nothing disgraceful,” 
 says Clement of Alexandria, “is proper for man, 
 who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, 
 to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what 
 nature she is.” Repression has combined with the 
 proprietary idea to make chastity a woman’s princi- 
 pal if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to 
 be punished with a severity that, in another view, 
 seems irrational and disproportionate, by perman- 
 ent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern 
 communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Eu- 
 rope, by violent death. An extraordinary incon- 
 sistency appears in the fact that since Christian 
 thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, 
 woman came to be regarded as the repository of 
 morality, and as such to be considered on a higher 
 moral plane than man. But it was really her econ- 
 omic and social inferiority that made her the reposi- 
 tory of morality. She must embody the ideal of 
 
32 Concerning Women 
 
 sexual restraint that her husband often found it in- 
 convenient or onerous to attain for himself; and 
 any unfaithfulness to this ideal on her part inflicted 
 upon him a mysterious injury called “dishonour.” 
 He might indulge his own polygamous leanings 
 with impunity, but his failure to make effective his 
 sexual monopoly of his wife made him liable to 
 contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this no- 
 tion persist that one may find anthropologists, usu- 
 ally the most objective among our men of science, 
 gauging the morality of a primitive people by the 
 chastity of its women. 
 
 Of course the effect of the attempt to make the 
 chastity of women a matter of morality and law, has 
 been the precise opposite of the one aimed at. So- 
 ciety can never be made virtuous through arbitrary 
 regulation; it can only be made unhappy and un- 
 amiable. The attempt to suppress all unauthorized 
 expression of the sex-impulse in women tended to 
 make them not only miserable and abject, but hypo- 
 critical and deceitful; and it tended also to make 
 men predatory. This was its inevitable result in 
 a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty 
 for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all; a 
 result which has made the relations between the 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 33 
 
 sexes in the Christian world about as bad as any 
 that could be imagined. Theoretically, to be sure, 
 Christianity exacted of men the same degree of 
 chastity as of women; practically it did no such 
 thing, as may be amply proved even now by a 
 study of the marriage and divorce laws of Chris- 
 tian nations, not excepting our own . 1 The sexual 
 license of the dominant male was limited only by 
 the practicable correspondence between his own de- 
 sires and his opportunities; and thanks to that con- 
 venient being, the prostitute, his opportunities were 
 plentiful. Hence for him, women were divided 
 into two classes: the chaste and respectable from 
 whom he chose the wife who kept his home, bore his 
 children, and embodied his virtue; and those out- 
 casts from society who promoted the chastity of the 
 first class by offering themselves, for a price, as 
 sacrifices to illicit sexual desire. Neither class was 
 he bound to respect; for the only thing that com- 
 pels respect is independence, and in neither the first 
 nor the second class were women independent. 
 From the man’s point of view, such a social ar- 
 
 1 In the State of Maryland, if the wife be found to have been 
 unchaste before marriage, the husband is entitled to a divorce; but 
 premarital unchastity on the part of the husband gives the wife no 
 corresponding ground. 
 
34 Concerning Women 
 
 rangement was superficially satisfactory. It pro- 
 vided for what might be called the utilitarian ends 
 of sex; that is to say, the man’s name was perpetu- 
 ated and his natural appetites gratified. But be- 
 yond this it left a good deal to be desired. Its worst 
 effect was by way of a complete evaporation of the 
 spiritual quality of union between man and woman 
 and the very considerable dehumanization that in 
 consequence set in. Both the wife and the prosti- 
 tute were man’s creatures quoad hoc, to be used for 
 different purposes but equally to be used. It is 
 hardly to be wondered at that man came to regard 
 women as “the sex,” and through his own manage- 
 ment of their degradation came to feel and to ex- 
 press toward them a degree of contempt that cast 
 considerable doubt on his own humanity. It is in- 
 variable that the person who is able to regard any 
 class of human beings as per se his natural in- 
 feriors, will by so doing sacrifice something of his 
 own spiritual integrity. In his relation to woman, 
 man occupied a position of privilege analogous to 
 that occupied by the aristocracy in the State; and 
 he paid the same penalty for his exercise of a 
 usurped and irresponsible power: a coarsening of 
 his spiritual fibre. One of the oddest of the many 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 35 
 
 odd superstitions that have grown out of male domi- 
 nation is the notion that men suffer less spiritual 
 harm from sexual promiscuity than women; and 
 this in spite of the biblical injunction, applied ex- 
 clusively to their sex: “None who go unto her re- 
 turn again.” This superstition is accountable for 
 abundant and incurable misery; and so slow is it 
 to disappear that one is inclined to advocate a move- 
 ment for the emancipation of men, a movement toi 
 free them from the prejudices and prepossessions 
 concerning women that are inculcated by the tradi- 
 tional point of view. 
 
 We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked 
 upon woman as man’s creature and his chief tempta- 
 tion, and that Christian society took good care to 
 keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her 
 the enemy of man’s better self in a way that appar- 
 ently was not foreseen by St. Paul, whose concern 
 with the temptations of the flesh seems to have been a 
 matter of more passionate conviction than his con- 
 cern with those of the spirit. Woman’s subordinate 
 position; her enforced ignorance; the narrowness 
 of the interests that were allowed her; the exag- 
 gerated regard for the opinion of other people that 
 was bound to be developed in a creature whose whole 
 
36 Concerning Women 
 
 life depended on her reputation — these conditions 
 were calculated to evolve the sort of being which is 
 hardly able to give clear recognition either to her 
 own spiritual interest or to that of other people. 
 Such a being would be the enemy of man’s spiritual 
 interest primarily through sheer inability to under- 
 stand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own 
 destiny; how could she be expected to conceive of 
 any other or higher for man? Her whole life must 
 be lived for appearances; how could she help man 
 to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of 
 appearances that such an ideal might entail? The 
 only renunciation of the world that figured in her 
 life was that which led to the convent; of that re- 
 nunciation which involves being in the world but 
 not of it — that steady repudiation of its standards 
 which clears the way to spiritual freedom — of such 
 a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable 
 even to dream. The inevitable result of this en- 
 forced narrowness was well stated by John Stuart 
 Mill in the essay which remains the classic of femi- 
 nist literature ; he pointed out that in a world where 
 women are almost exclusively occupied with ma- 
 terial interests, where their standard of appraisal 
 is the opinion of other people, their ambition will 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 37 
 
 naturally connect itself with material things, with 
 wealth and prestige, no matter how inimical such 
 an ambition may be to the spiritual interests of the 
 men upon whom they depend. That there have 
 been distinguished exceptions to this rule does 
 credit to the strength of character which has enabled 
 an individual now and then to attain something like 
 spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and re- 
 tarding environment/ 
 
 hi 
 
 The effects of repression and seclusion on the 
 character of woman have given rise, and an appear- 
 ance of reason, to a host of other superstitions about 
 her nature; notions which have been expressed in 
 terms by many writers and have coloured the 
 thought of many others. To offer a petty but in- 
 teresting example, one of the most widely prevalent 
 and most easily disproved of these is the belief that 
 women are by nature more given to self-decoration 
 than men. Certainly the practice in civilized so- 
 ciety at present seems to bear out this notion. But 
 when we turn to primitive communities we find, on 
 the contrary, that the men are likely to be vainer of 
 
38 Concerning Women 
 
 finery and more given to it than the women. The 
 reason is simple: decoration of the person arises 
 from the desire to enhance sex-attraction; and it is 
 most industriously practised by that sex among 
 whose members there is the keener competition for 
 favour with members of the opposite sex. In Euro- 
 pean civilization marriage has been practically the 
 only economic occupation open to women; but mo- 
 nogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of 
 females and an increasing proportion of celibacy 
 among males, has made it impossible for every 
 woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry 
 among them has been keen, and their interest in self- 
 decoration has been largely professional. “If in 
 countries with European civilization,” says Wester- 
 marck, “women nevertheless are more particular 
 about their appearance and more addicted to self- 
 decoration than the other sex, the reason for it may 
 be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in 
 getting married. But there is seldom any such dif- 
 ficulty in the savage world. Here it is, on the 
 contrary, the man who runs the risk of being 
 obliged to lead a single life.” 
 
 M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that 
 “the inclination to bright and ornamental clothing 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 39 
 
 is dependent not upon sex, but upon the power- 
 relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether 
 male or female, seeks ornament.” But it would 
 seem, in view of the accepted theory that self- 
 decoration originates in the desire to enhance sex- 
 attraction, that Westermarck’s is the more reason- 
 able explanation; moreover it covers certain cases 
 in primitive life where the women, although their 
 position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while 
 the men are given to elaborate decoration of their 
 persons. 
 
 In spite of all the evidence which anthropology 
 arrays against it, however, the notion persists that 
 woman is by nature more addicted to self-decoration 
 than man; and there are not wanting advocates of 
 her subjection, among them many women, who main- 
 tain that it shows the essential immaturity of her 
 mind! 
 
 (The notion that women are by nature mentally 
 inferior to men, is primarily due to the fact that 
 their enforced ignorance made them appear inferior. 
 This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning 
 women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been 
 much weakened by modern experience, but it has by 
 no means disappeared. Indeed, it has stood in the 
 
40 Concerning Women 
 
 way of dispassionate scientific study of the relative 
 mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in 
 his “Man and Woman,” says that “the history of 
 opinion regarding cerebral sexual difference forms 
 a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of 
 prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty gen- 
 eralizations. The unscientific have a predilection 
 for this subject; and men of science seem to have 
 lost the scientific spirit when they approached the 
 study of its seat. ... It is only of recent years that 
 a comparatively calm and disinterested study of the 
 brain has become in any degree common; and even 
 today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning 
 sexual differences may be easily summed up.” He 
 then proceeds to show that those differences are 
 few. It might be remarked here that such actual 
 differences as appear are differences between man 
 and woman as they now are, and can not be taken 
 as final. If brain-mass, for example, depends to 
 some extent on physical size and strength, the mass 
 of woman’s brain should tend to increase as she 
 abandons her unnatural seclusion, engages in ex- 
 acting occupations and indulges in vigorous physi- 
 cal exercise. Already there has been an astonish- 
 ing change in the female figure. An interesting 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 41 
 
 indication of this is a recent dispatch from Germany 
 stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of 
 that country the average German woman of today 
 wears a shoe two sizes larger than the woman of a 
 century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to en- 
 large with proper use, so in all likelihood will her 
 brain. 
 
 Even Plato, who advocated the education of 
 woman, held that while her capacities did not differ 
 in kind from those of man, they differed in degree 
 because of her inferiority in physical strength. It 
 was a broad-minded view; for the most part women 
 have simply been held to be by nature relatively 
 weak-minded and therefore relatively ineducable. 
 They have already passed one general test of educa- 
 bility, by entering schools on the same footing with 
 men and showing themselves equally able to achieve 
 a high scholastic standing; yet the Platonic notion 
 persists that they are physically incapable of going 
 as far as men can go in intellectual pursuits. This 
 question can probably not be settled a priori to any 
 one’s satisfaction. It must be conceded, after the 
 fact, however, that considering the short time that 
 women have been tolerated in the schools and in the 
 practical prosecution of intellectual pursuits, the 
 
42 Concerning Women 
 
 showing they have made has really been quite as 
 good as might reasonably be expected, and that it 
 certainly has not been such as to warrant any arbi- 
 trary fixing of limits beyond which they can not or 
 shall not go. Moreover, the physical weakness 
 which is supposed to disable woman intellectually 
 may be itself a result of her adaptation to her en- 
 vironment. There is no way that I know of to 
 forecast with any kind of accuracy ^vjiat a few gen- 
 erations of freedom will accomplish specifically in 
 the way of spiritual development. Considering that 
 human beings are “creatures of a large discourse,” 
 the matter is probably determinable only by experi- 
 ment — solvitur ambulando. 
 
 Nor will there be any reason to agree with the 
 numerous adherents of the idea that women are 
 naturally incapable of great creative work in any 
 field until they shall have failed, after generations 
 and even centuries of complete freedom, to produce 
 great creative work. This notion represents the last 
 stand of a priori judgment concerning female intelli- 
 gence. It is based on the theory, at present much 
 in fashion, that men are more variable than women, 
 and that both idiocy and genius are thus much more 
 frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence of 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 43 
 
 women 7 tends to keep to the safe ground of medioc- 
 rity. /, The implications of this theory manifestly 
 are that genius of the highest order can not be ex- 
 pected to appear in a womann Since all cats are 
 grey in the dark, according to the proverb, nothing 
 worth saying can be said against this theory or for 
 it. The data which underly it are simply incom- 
 petent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way 
 or the other. They represent only a projection of 
 men and women as they now are, and therefore can 
 not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning 
 men and women as they may become. To say, for 
 instance, that because there has never been, to our 
 knowledge, any woman, with the possible exception 
 of Sappho, who showed the highest order of g en- 
 ius in the arts i t is probable that ther e never c an or 
 wilkbe, is much thejame as to jsay that becau se there 
 has never been a woman President of^the United 
 Sfates~no woman ever can or will be Presi dent. Let 
 Ttl)Ufreeiy admitted that women have had opportun- 
 ities in the creative field, and have fallen short of su- 
 premacy. What of it? One must yet perceive that 
 the woman who has had those opportunities has been 
 the product of a civilization constitutionally inimi- 
 cal to her use of them, and one may not assume that 
 
44 Concerning Women 
 
 she has entirely escaped the effects of the continuous 
 repression and discouragement exercised upon her 
 by her social, domestic and political environment. 
 When the power and purchase of this influence are 
 fully taken into account, one would say it is not half 
 so remarkable that women have missed supreme 
 greatness in the arts as that they have been able to 
 achieve anything at all. For in the arts, more than 
 anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great 
 achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great 
 deal more than the mere absence of formal restraint 
 upon the processes of writing books or painting pic- 
 tures. It is this important distinction that writers 
 like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have over- 
 looked or ignored. They have simply failed to take 
 into account the effect of a generally debilitating en- 
 vironment on the activities of the human spirit. 
 
 The environment of women has long been such 
 as tends to make them, much more than men, the 
 slaves of “was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine,” and 
 therefore to win release from the commonplace was, 
 and still is, proportionately harder for a woman than 
 for a man. The prevailing notion that a woman 
 must at all costs cultivate the approval of the world $ 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 45 
 
 lest she fail, through lack of it, to manoeuvre her- 
 self successfully into the only occupation that society 
 showed any cordiality about opening to her — this 
 put a heavy premium on dissimulation and artifice. 
 Women have not dared freely to be themselves, even 
 to themselves. It was the effect of this constraint 
 that Stendhal noted when he remarked that “the 
 reason why women, when they become authors, 
 rarely attain the sublime, ... is that they never 
 dare to be more than half candid.” 
 
 It can not be gainsaid that the east w T ind of in- 
 difference which has chilled the fire of many a 
 masculine artist who found himself part of an age 
 indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown 
 its coldest upon the woman who essayed creative 
 work. The woman who undertakes to achieve ar- 
 tistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated 
 by men, finds herself opposed by many disabling 
 influences. In an earlier day she had to endure 
 being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked be- 
 cause she dared venture outside the limited sphere 
 of sexuality that had been assigned to her. jNow 
 her presence in the field of spiritual endeavour is 
 taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with the 
 
46 Concerning Women 
 
 tacit assumption, which finds expression in a thou- 
 sand subtle ways, that her work must be inferior on 
 account of her sex. 1 ^ Again, the idea that marriage 
 and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling and 
 are really the natural and proper calling for every 
 woman, still has general currency; and the very fact 
 that a vast majority of women tacitly acquiesce in 
 this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the indi- 
 vidual towards the orthodox and expected. Human 
 beings are always powerfully drawn to be like their 
 fellows; to be different requires a somewhat un- 
 common independence of spirit and toughness of 
 fibre, and the fewer the individuals who attempt 
 it, the more independence and tenacity it requires. 
 “The fewer there be who follow the way to heaven,” 
 says the author of the Imitation, “the harder that 
 way is to find.” 
 
 The position of woman in creative work the world 
 over is analogous to that of the man in America 
 who ventures into the arts: he will be tolerated; he 
 may even be respected; but he will not find in his 
 
 1 As tiie only woman member of an editorial staff during a period 
 of four years, I had ample opportunity for experience of this atti- 
 tude. It was openly expressed only twice, both times, oddly enough, 
 by women ; but so universal was the unconscious assumption of 
 inferiority that I may say without great exaggeration that it was 
 only among my colleagues that I did not meet with it. 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 47 
 
 environment the interest and encouragement that 
 will help to develop his talents and spur him to his 
 best efforts. He may get sympathy and encourage- 
 ment from individuals; but his environment as a 
 whole will not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well 
 termed the “tolerant expectancy” which nourishes 
 and develops genius. . In American civilization the 
 prevailing ideal for men is business — material suc- 
 cess; and our people retain, as Van Wyck Brooks 
 has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and disregard 
 which the pioneer community displays towards the 
 individual whose governing ideals take a different 
 line of development from those of his fellows. The 
 artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as a 
 queer being who loses something of his manhood by 
 taking up purely cultural pursuits, unless and un- 
 til, indeed, he happens to make money by it. Yet 
 one never hears the intimation that because no 
 Shakespeare or Raphael has ever yet appeared in 
 this country, none ever will. Very well — imagine 
 instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and 
 you perceive at once the invidious position of the 
 woman artist in an exclusively or dominantly mas- 
 culine civilization. 
 
 But what if the emergence of genius does not 
 
48 Concerning Women 
 
 depend so much on variability as upon the degree 
 of spiritual freedom that the environment allows, 
 and the amount and kind of culture that is current 
 in it? “The number of geniuses produced in a na- 
 tion,” says Stendhal, “is in proportion to the number 
 of men receiving sufficient culture, and there is 
 nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not 
 the soul to write like Corneille. He wants the edu- 
 cation necessary to develop his feelings and teach 
 him to communicate them to the public.” The fact 
 that prominent men of science accept the theory that 
 genius is explained by variability, along with a 
 number of conclusions which they have seen fit to 
 draw from it, is no reason why their view should be 
 considered final. Whole schools of scientists have 
 before now gone wrong in the ticklish business of 
 making speculative generalizations; they may go 
 wrong again, for men of science are human, and 
 may not be supposed to live wholly above the 
 miasma arising from the stagnant mass of current 
 prepossessions. So long as the apparent dearth of 
 female genius may be satisfactorily accounted for on 
 other grounds, one is under no compulsion to accept 
 the theory that it is due to a natural and inescapable 
 tendency toward mediocrity. When regarded fairly, 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 49 
 
 indeed, this theory has something of an ad captan- 
 dum character; it is not in itself disingenuous, per- 
 haps, but it lends itself with great ease to an in- 
 terested use. It offers strong support, for example, 
 to an advocacy of an actual qualitative difference in 
 the education of men and women. ^Vomen, being 
 assumed to be fixed by nature at or below the line 
 of mediocrity, shall be educated exclusively for 
 marriage, motherhood, and the occupations which 
 require no more than an average of reflective intel- 
 ligence."') This assumption underlies the educational 
 plans of even such great libertarians as Thomas 
 Jefferson and Theodore Hertzka; it represents a re- 
 version, conscious or unconscious, to the primitive 
 ideology which subordinates the individual to the 
 group, taking for granted that the individual is to be 
 educated not primarily for his or her own sake, but 
 for an impersonal “good of society.” Thus, 
 whether they are aware of it or not, those who sub- 
 scribe to this theory would not only keep in woman’s 
 way the discouraging postulate of inferiority that at 
 present stands against her, but they would reinforce 
 upon her those arbitrary limitations of opportunity 
 to which her position of inferiority in the past may 
 not unreasonably be ascribed. 
 
50 
 
 Concerning Women 
 
 IV 
 
 I have mentioned the repression of natural im- 
 pulse inculcated upon women by their upbringing. 
 This will probably not disappear entirely until the 
 prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help 
 them to become fully human beings, rather than 
 to make them marriageable; for humanity and 
 market-value have really little in common!^ For 
 centuries the minds and bodies of women have been 
 moulded to suit the more or less casual taste of men. 
 This was the condition of their profession, which 
 was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her liv- 
 j ing by her sex; her artificially-induced deformi- 
 ties and imbecilities had an economic value: they 
 helped to get her married. It would be impossible 
 to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence 
 than the dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that 
 has been held up before womankind. “We train 
 them up,” says Montaigne, “from their infancy to 
 the traffic of love.” Yet men would have them, he 
 says, “in full health, vigorous, in good keeping, 
 high-fed and chaste together; 1 that is to say, both 
 
 1 This was 'written, needless to say, before the casual taste of men 
 set the fashion for women to be mincing and sickly. 
 
Woman s Status, Past and Present 51 
 
 hot and cold.” The utter levity of this traditional 
 attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man’s 
 worst failure. I know of no stronger argument 
 for the social philosophy of the anarchist; for there 
 is no more striking proof of the incapacity of human 
 beings to be their brothers’ keepers than man’s fail- 
 ure, through sheer levity, over thousands of years 
 to govern woman either for his good or her own. 
 
 With the growing disposition of women to take 
 their interests into their own hands, this state of 
 things is changing; but the curious superstitions to 
 which its effect on the female character has given 
 rise will long survive it) The world’s literature, 
 from the Sanscrit proverbs to the comic magazine of 
 the twentieth century, is full of disparaging refer- 
 ences to the character of women; to their frailty, their 
 cunning, their deceitfulness, their irresponsibility, 
 their treachery — qualities, all of them, which in a 
 fair view they seem bound to have extemporized as 
 their only defence in a social order which was proof 
 against more honourable weapons. “A woman,” 
 says Amiel, “is sometimes fugitive, irrational, inde- 
 terminable, illogical and contradictory. A great 
 deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a 
 good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, 
 
52 Concerning Women 
 
 for she may bring about innumerable evils with- 
 out knowing it.” This is no doubt true, and the 
 purposes of the moralist perhaps demand no more 
 than a mere statement of the fact. But the critic’s 
 purposes demand that the fact should give an ac- 
 count of itself. Why does woman so regularly bear 
 this character? Well, certainly the only life that 
 European civilization offered to women in Amiel’s 
 day — the only views of life that it accorded them, 
 the only demands on life that it allowed them — was 
 a specific for producing the kind of creature he 
 describes; and there is no doubt that it must have 
 produced them by the million. The inference is 
 inescapable that an equivalent incidence of the same 
 educational and environmental influences upon men 
 would have produced the same kind of men. The 
 matter, in short, is not one of the primary or even 
 the secondary character of women qua women or of 
 men qua men ; it is one of the effect of education and 
 environment upon human beings qua human beings. 
 
 The effort to escape this inference gives rise to 
 extraordinary inconsistencies in the current estimate 
 of female character, and even the estimate put upon 
 it by men of scientific habit. Women are supposed, 
 for instance, to be tenderer and gentler than men — 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 53 
 
 “Tenderness,” says Ellen Key, “distinguishes her 
 whole way of thinking and feeling, of wishing and 
 working” — yet they are also supposed to be more 
 vengeful — “Hell hath no fury . . .” They are 
 supposed to be creatures of impulse and sentiment 
 — “la femme, dont Vimpulsion sentimentale est le 
 seul guide ecoute ” 1 — yet they are at the same time 
 supposed to be calculating, particularly in their rela- 
 tions with men. Diluvial irruptions of sentimental- 
 ism are continually spewed over their nobility and 
 self-sacrifice in the role of motherhood; yet men 
 have taken care in the past to deny them guardian- 
 ship of their own children. Schopenhauer, far on 
 the right wing, again, appears to represent the legal- 
 istic point of view on this relation : he does not trust 
 them in it beyond the first purely instinctive love for 
 the child while it is physically helpless; he thinks 
 they should “never be given free control of their 
 children, wherever it can be avoided.” Man, now, 
 is more likely, he thinks, to love his child with a last- 
 ing love, because “in the child he recognizes his own 
 inner self ; that is to say his love for it is metaphysi- 
 cal [or egotistical?] in its origin.” Occasionally, 
 again, the world is treated to the diverting spectacle 
 
 1 Elie Faure. 
 
54 Concerning Women 
 
 of some woman writer, like Dr. Gina Lombroso, 
 trotting out all the poor old spavined superstitions 
 and putting them through their paces in order to 
 prove the strange contention that women are incap- 
 able of making the progress they have already made. 
 Dr. Lombroso’s ideal woman, as I have already re- 
 marked elsewhere in a review of her recent book, 
 is something of a cross between an imbecile and a 
 saint; that is to say, she conforms closely to the 
 ideal which has been held up before the women of 
 the Christian world; an ideal towards which millions 
 of them have striven with a faithfulness which does 
 more credit to their devotion than to their intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 'Since any discussion of woman’s place in society 
 must necessarily be to some extent a study in super- \ 
 stition, one can not really have done with supersti- 
 tion until one is done with the subjects. It has 
 seemed to warrant some special attention at the out- 
 set of this work not only because the past and pres- 
 ent status of womankind can not be explained with- 
 out reference to it, but because the future of 
 womankind will in large measure depend upon the 
 expeditiousness with which it and those preposses- 
 sions which spring from it, are laid aside. The 
 
Woman’s Status, Past and Present 55 
 
 sum of these superstitions and prepossessions may 
 be expressed in the generalization that woman is 
 primarily a function; and wherever any remote ap- 
 proach to this generalization may be discerned in a 
 discussion of her status or her rights — as it may 
 at once be discerned, for instance, in the sentimental 
 side of the work of feminists as staunch as Ellen 
 Key and Olive Schreiner — at just that point the ab- 
 dication of the scientific spirit in favour of super- 
 stition may be suspected. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC 
 ASPECTS 
 I 
 
 Marriage, by a strictly technical definition, is a 
 natural habit; that is to say, it is a relationship 
 proceeding out of the common instinct of male 
 and female to mate, and to remain together until 
 after the birth of one or more children , 1 Organized 
 society, on the other hand, always makes it a civil 
 institution, and sometimes a religious institution. 
 So long as man remained in the natural state, roam- 
 ing about in search of his food as do the apes to- 
 day, it may be supposed that marriage was based 
 on personal preference and involved only the selec- 
 tive disposition of the individual man and woman 
 and their common concern for the safety of their 
 offspring. But as advancing civilization enabled 
 mankind more easily to obtain and augment its 
 food-supply, and consequently to secure greater 
 
 1 Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion 
 between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation 
 till after the birth of the offspring.” 
 
 56 
 
Institutional Marriage 57 
 
 safety and also to satisfy its gregarious instinct by 
 living in numerous communities, the habit of mar- 
 riage underwent a process of sanction and regula- 
 tion by the group, and was thus transformed into 
 a civil institution. While society remains ethnical, 
 the family exercises supervision over the sexual re- 
 lations of its members, but always subject to the 
 approval or disapproval of the larger group — the 
 tribe or clan. When the political State emerges, 
 this function continues to be exercised by the fam- 
 ily, but it is subject to sanction by the State and is 
 gradually absorbed by it. Yet even where the State 
 has usurped almost all the prerogatives of the fam- 
 ily, custom continues to give powerful sanction to 
 interference in marriage both by relatives and by 
 the community. 
 
 Where the tribal religion takes on the form of 
 ancestor-worship, or where much importance is at- 
 tached to burial-rites, marriage and reproduction 
 take on a religious significance. “As the dead,” 
 says Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, “are dependent on 
 the living for the performance of their funeral rites 
 •and sacrificial observances, marriage itself as well 
 as marriage according to prescribed conditions, 
 child-begetting and bearing, become religious duties. 
 
58 Concerning Women 
 
 Marriage ceremonial not infrequently takes on a 
 religious character. Infanticide, abortion, celibacy 
 other than celibacy of a sacerdotal character, and 
 adultery, become sins. The punishment of the 
 adulteress is particularly severe, although in some 
 cases her value as property may guarantee her 
 against punishment by death.” 1 
 
 Thus there may be, and in most civilized societies 
 there is, a fourfold interference in marriage: inter- 
 ference by the family, by the community, by the 
 State, and by the Church. An old Russian song 
 had it that marriages were contracted 
 
 By the will of God, 
 
 By decree of the Czar, 
 
 By order of the Master, 
 
 By decision of the community, 
 
 — with not a word about the two persons imme- 
 diately concerned. Nor is this strange, for mar- 
 riage is not generally conceived of among either 
 primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal 
 relationship. It is an economic arrangement, an 
 alliance between families, a means for getting chil- 
 dren. To allow so unruly a passion as love to figure 
 
 1 E. C. Parsons: “The Family.” 
 
Institutional Marriage 59 
 
 in the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which 
 may under certain circumstances be tolerated, but 
 one which is nevertheless likely to be regarded with 
 extreme disapproval. As individualism makes 
 progress against group-tyranny, the preliminaries 
 and the actual contracting of marriage become less 
 the affair of God, the State, the family and the 
 community, and more the affair of the two people 
 chiefly interested; but once contracted, the marriage 
 can hardly be said, even in the most civilized com- 
 munity, to be free of considerable regulation by these 
 four influences. The time which Spencer foresaw, 
 when “the union by affection will be held of primary 
 moment and the union by law as of secondary 
 moment,” has by no means arrived. If the married 
 couple be Roman Catholics, for example, they may 
 not free themselves from an unhappy marriage 
 without paying the penalty of excommunication; 
 and if they live in a State dominated by the Catholic 
 Church, they may be legally estopped from freeing 
 themselves at all. Nor may they, save by con- 
 tinence, limit the number of their offspring without 
 risking the same penalty. If they are Episcopalians 
 or Lutherans they may divorce only on the ground 
 of adultery, and the guilty party is forbidden to re- 
 
60 Concerning Women 
 
 marry. In communities where the influence of other 
 Protestant sects predominates, and where, therefore, 
 divorce and remarriage are not formally forbidden 
 by the Church, the pressure of public opinion may 
 yet operate to prevent them. The State not only 
 prescribes the form that marriage shall take, but it 
 may also either prohibit divorce — as in South Caro- 
 lina, for example — or forbid it save in accordance 
 with such regulations as it sees fit to make ; and these 
 regulations are not only of a kind that make divorce 
 prohibitive to the poor, but they are often so humil- 
 iating as to constitute an effective barrier to the dis- 
 solution of unhappy unions. The State of New 
 York offers an excellent illustration. Adultery is 
 the only ground upon which divorce is allowed, and 
 even then it may be refused if the action is taken 
 by mutual consent. The couple who wish to be 
 divorced must therefore, if there be no legal cause, 
 go through the demoralizing business of making a 
 case, which means that one or the other must pro- 
 vide at least the appearance of “misconduct”; and 
 even then they are in danger of being found in col- 
 lusion. But suppose one party to be giving legal 
 ground; then the other party, in order to get proof, 
 is obliged to resort to the lowest kind of espionage. 
 
Institutional Marriage 61 
 
 Such disreputable methods, however much they be 
 in keeping with the nature and practices of the State, 
 are hardly becoming to civilized society, and civil- 
 ized persons are indisposed towards them. Their 
 general effect is therefore to discourage application 
 for divorce in New York and encourage it else- 
 where. 
 
 It is significant of the unspiritual estimate gener- 
 ally put upon marriage, that incompatibility is rarely 
 allowed as a legal ground of divorce. Violation 
 of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies; pre- 
 nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; im- 
 potence; cruelty; desertion; failure of support; in- 
 sanity; all of these or some of them are the grounds 
 generally recognized where divorce is allowed at all. 
 This is to say that society demands a specific griev- 
 ance of one party against the other, a grievance hav- 
 ing physical or economic consequences, as a pre- 
 requisite to freedom from the marriage-bond. The 
 fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is 
 seldom taken into account. Yet there is no difficulty 
 about which less can be done. Infidelity may be 
 forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter may 
 return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support 
 his family; the insane person may recover; even 
 
62 Concerning Women 
 
 impotence may be cured. But if two people are out 
 of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at ease 
 lin one another’s society, there is nothing to be done 
 about it. “Anything,” says Turgenev, “may be 
 smoothed over, memories of even the most tragic 
 domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and 
 bitterness ; but if once a sense of being ill at ease in- 
 stalls itself between two closely united persons, it 
 can never be dislodged.” Modern society is slowly, 
 very slowly, coming into the wisdom which prompted 
 this observation. The gradual liberalization of the 
 divorce-laws which our moralists regard as a symp- 
 tom of modern disrespect for the sacredness of mar- 
 riage, is in fact a symptom of a directly opposite 
 tendency — the tendency to place marriage on a 
 higher spiritual plane than it has hitherto occupied. 
 
 The State assumes the right either to allow arti- 
 ficial limitation of offspring or to make it a crime; 
 and it exercises this assumption according to its 
 need for citizens 1 or the complexion of its religious 
 establishment. It also fixes the relative status and 
 
 1 It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war 
 England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a 
 heavy drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it 
 has been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now 
 sees these devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows. 
 
Institutional Marriage 63 
 
 rights of the two parties. In several American 
 States, for instance, a married woman is incompetent 
 to make contracts or to fix her legal residence. The 
 Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the 
 father to the custody of the child, yet it makes the 
 mother criminally liable for the support of children. 
 On the other hand, the husband is everywhere re- 
 quired by law to support his wife. Such laws, of 
 course, like most laws, are felt only when the indi- 
 vidual comes into conflict with them. The State 
 does not interfere in many cases where married 
 couples subvert its regulations — for example, the 
 law which entitles the husband to his wife’s services 
 in the home and permits him to control her right 
 to work outside the home, does not become binding 
 save in cases where the husband sees fit to invoke 
 it. As a rule the State forbids fornication and adul- 
 tery . 1 In case of separation and divorce, if the 
 parties disagree concerning financial arrangements 
 Or the custody of children, it exercises the right to 
 arbitrate these matters. 
 
 The sanctions of interference by the family, save 
 in the contracting of marriage by minors, are at 
 
 1 In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle 
 a husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the 
 marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars. 
 
64 Concerning Women 
 
 present those of custom, affection, and (in so far 
 as it exists and may be made effective) economic 
 power. When two persons have decided to marry, 
 for instance, it remains quite generally customary 
 for the man to go through the formality of asking 
 the woman’s nearest male relation for her hand. 
 This is of course a survival from the period when 
 a woman’s male guardian had actual power to pre- 
 vent her marrying without his consent. The in- 
 fluence of affection is too obvious to require illustra- 
 tion; it is the subtlest and most powerful sanction 
 of family interference. Economic power is perhaps 
 most commonly used to prevent or compel the con- 
 tracting of marriage. It may make itself felt, where 
 parents or other relatives are well-to-do, in threats 
 of disinheritance if prospective heirs undertake to 
 make marriages which are displeasing to them. A 
 striking instance of the use of this power is the wall 
 of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his 
 children to obtain consent of the others before marry- 
 ing. It is not uncommon for legators to stipulate 
 that legatees shall or shall not marry before a cer- 
 tain age under penalty of losing their inheritance. 
 
 These influences do not always, of course, take 
 the same direction. At present, for example, arti- 
 
Institutional Marriage 65 
 
 ficial limitation of offspring receives irregular but 
 effective community-sanction in face of opposition 
 by Church and State. Or again, public opinion 
 almost universally condemns the idea that a father 
 may, by his will, remove his children from the cus- 
 tody of their mother, although the State, as in Mary- 
 land and Delaware, may sanction such an act. 
 But, however much they may check one another, 
 these influences are all constantly operating to re- 
 strict and regulate marriage away from its original 
 intention as a purely personal relationship, and to 
 keep it in the groove of economic and social institu- 
 tionalism. The reasons for this are to be found 
 in the vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of 
 the habitual, religious superstition, and above all in 
 the notion that the major interests of the group are 
 essentially opposed to those of the individual and 
 are more important than his. A combination of 
 two of these motives has recently come under my 
 own observation in the case of a young woman whose 
 parents can not forgive her for having divorced a 
 man whom she did not love and married a man 
 whom she did. They were accustomed to their first 
 son-in-law, and resent the necessity of adjusting 
 themselves to the idea of having a new one. More- 
 
66 Concerning Women 
 
 over, they feel that their daughter should have 
 spared them the “disgrace” of a divorce. The fact 
 that she was unhappy in her first marriage and is 
 happy in her second seems to have little weight with 
 them. They did their best to prevent her second 
 marriage and are at present exerting every effort to 
 make it unsuccessful. It is needless to emphasize 
 the fact that this order of interference can not be 
 expected to disappear while the notion persists that 
 the actions of one adult member of a family or 
 group can possibly reflect credit or discredit upon 
 all the other members. 
 
 n 
 
 If one be an apologist for the present economic 
 and social order, there is little fault to be found with 
 this endless and manifold regulation of the most 
 intimate concern of the individual, save that it is 
 not as effective as it once was. Society, we are being 
 constantly reminded, is founded in the family. No 
 one, I think, will quarrel with this statement, par- 
 ticularly at this stage of the world’s rule by the ex- 
 ploiting State. Marriage is, to quote Dr. E. C. 
 Parsons, “an incomparable protection of society — 
 
Institutional Marriage 67 
 
 as society has been constituted”; and this for a 
 reason which Dr. Parsons did not mention. Nor 
 has the reason been stated by anyone else, so far as 
 I am aware, although the fact is emphasized often 
 enough. It is emphasized, however, largely in the 
 spirit of a contemporary French writer who declares 
 that “an institution upon which society 1 is based 
 should not be represented to society as an instru- 
 ment of torture, a barbarous apparatus. We know, 
 on the contrary that this institution is good, and 
 that it would be impossible to conceive of a better 
 one upon which to base our customs.” Well, but 
 suppose it is an instrument of torture, or at least 
 that we have come to find it highly unsatisfactory; 
 must we, in spite of the fact, resolve to think it good 
 because society is based upon it? Ought we not, 
 
 1 It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word 
 “Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the 
 State. In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical. 
 There is general agreement among scholars, according to Professor 
 Beard, that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary, 
 and organization for other purposes, e. g., what we know as “law 
 and order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, 
 really implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so 
 used by scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed 
 a State and are without government of any kind, maintain society, 
 i. e., a quite highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas 
 Jefferson remarked this phenomenon among the American Indian 
 hunting tribes, and so did the historian Parkman. 
 
68 Concerning Women 
 
 rather, to examine the order of society that institu- 
 tionalized marriage helps to perpetuate, in order to 
 determine whether it is worth preserving at the cost 
 of preserving also an institution which has become 
 “an instrument of torture”? 
 
 The reason why marriage is “an incomparable 
 protection to society” lies in the fact that the con- 
 tinuance of the power of the exploiting State de- 
 pends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited 
 subjects; and nothing renders the subject more help- 
 less against the dominance of the State than mar- 
 riage. For monopoly, under the protection of the 
 State, has rendered the support of a family ex- 
 tremely difficult, by closing free access of labour to 
 natural resources and thus enabling the constant 
 maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is 
 little or no land not legally occupied, access to the 
 soil is impossible save on terms that render it, if not 
 downright prohibitive, at least unprofitable. The 
 breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is 
 thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market 
 overcrowded by applicants for work who are in 
 exactly his position: they are shut out from oppor- 
 tunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept 
 such employment as they can get at a wage deter- 
 
Institutional Marriage 69 
 
 mined not by their capacity to produce, but by the 
 number of their competitors. Not only is the wage- 
 earner thus obliged to content himself with a small 
 share of what his labour produces; he is forced to 
 pay out of that share further tribute to monopoly in 
 most of the things he buys. For shelter, for the 
 products of the soil and mines, he pays tribute to 
 the monopolist of land and natural resources; for 
 industrial products, in most countries, he pays to the 
 monopoly created by high tariffs. Or he may have 
 to pay to both, as in the case of the purchaser of steel 
 products. 
 
 Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages 
 near the subsistence-level, but to keep opinions 
 orthodox — or if not orthodox, unexpressed. For the 
 wage-earner gets his living on sufferance: while he 
 continues to please his employer he may earn a liv- 
 ing, however inadequate, for himself and family; 
 but if he show signs of discontent with the estab- 
 lished order, by which his employer benefits or 
 thinks he benefits, he is likely to find himself sup- 
 planted by some other worker whose need makes 
 him more willing to conform, in appearance at least. 
 There are even conditions under which his mere 
 unorthodoxy may bring him to jail, in thirty-four 
 
70 Concerning Women 
 
 States of this enlightened Republic. There are ex- 
 ceptional cases, of course, where his skill or special 
 training makes him a virtual monopolist in his line 
 and thus renders him indispensable, like a certain 
 well-known professor who continues to hold his posi- 
 tion in spite of his avowed economic unorthodoxy 
 simply because there is no one else who can fill it. 
 But it may be perceived at once that the average 
 wage-earner with a family to support will be under 
 much greater pressure to dissemble than will the 
 worker who has no family; for where the single 
 worker risks privation for himself alone, the married 
 worker takes this risk for his family as well. Nor 
 does economic pressure operate only towards the 
 appearance of conformity; it operates towards actual 
 conformity, for the person who has children to rear 
 and educate will be strongly impelled towards con- 
 servatism by his situation. If he can get along at 
 all under the present order, the mere vis inertiae will 
 incline him to fear for the sake of his family the 
 economic dislocation attendant upon any revolution- 
 ary change, and to choose rather to keep the ills he 
 has . 1 Moreover, the unnatural situation popularly 
 
 1 This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because 
 monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively 
 well. Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attrib- 
 
Institutional Marriage 71 
 
 called the “labour-problem,” brought about through 
 exclusion from the land, tends to create the psy- 
 chology of the wage-slave: it tends to make people 
 regard the opportunity to earn one’s living not as a 
 natural right, but as something that one receives as 
 a boon from one’s employer, and hence to accept 
 the idea that an employer may be justified in dic- 
 tating to his employees in matters of conduct and 
 opinion. 
 
 (Thus the economic conditions brought about by 
 the State operate to make marriage the State’s strong- 
 est bulwark; and those who believe that the preser- 
 vation of the State, or of a particular form of it, 
 is a sacred duty — their number among its victims 
 is legion — are quite logical in taking alarm at the 
 increasing unwillingness of men and women to 
 
 utable to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of al- 
 most unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. 
 If the American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its 
 members are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to ex- 
 pect an improvement before long, since the country has recovered 
 from a panic about every twenty years for the past century. They 
 do not understand that the measure of recovery they hope for is 
 now impossible. How many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to 
 ask themselves why this country has suffered from uninterrupted 
 economic “depression,” with the exception of the war-period, ever 
 since the panic of 1907? What they regard as depression is really 
 the normal result of complete land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices 
 have continued to rise since the war; which is to say that real 
 wages have fallen. 
 
72 Concerning Women 
 
 marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They 
 are logical not only because marriage and children 
 make for endurance of established abuses, but be- 
 cause, as I have already remarked, it is important 
 for the State to have as many subjects as possible, 
 to keep up a labour-surplus at home and to fight for 
 the interests of its privileged class abroad; that is, 
 so long as industry is able to meet the exactions of 
 monopoly and still pay interest and wages. Where 
 monopoly has reduced, interest and wages to -the 
 vanishing-point, the State can no longer be said to 
 be a going concern; its breakdown is then only a 
 matter of time. This point has been reached in 
 England, and hence the condition of which I have 
 spoken: a numerous population is no longer desir- 
 able, for as unemployed they are a burden on the 
 State and a menace to its existence. But as long 
 as the State is a going concern, the Spartan rule is 
 that best suited to its interests: obligatory marriage, 
 and unlimited reproduction. 
 
 In modern civilization, however, in spite of the 
 enormous power of the State, it would be extremely 
 difficult if not impossible to enforce this rule. The 
 State, with all its power, can not force its subjects to 
 obey any law which they do not really want to obey 
 
Institutional Marriage 73 
 
 — or perhaps I should say, which they want not to 
 obey; and the growth of individualism has created 
 a general distaste for any effort on the part of gov- 
 ernment to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. 
 Attempts to do so are likely to bring humiliation on 
 the Government through its inability to enforce 
 them, and to generate in the population a salutary 
 disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the 
 fourteenth and eighteenth Amendments has done in 
 this country. With the decline of the patriarchal 
 system, the contracting of marriage if not the status 
 of marriage, is coming to be regarded as the ex- 
 clusive concern of the individual. Many who 
 would not for a moment tolerate compulsory mar- 
 riage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of mar- 
 riage; they will allow the State to make of marriage 
 a life-long bondage, but they reserve the right to 
 refuse to enter into bondage. The State may penal- 
 ize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried 
 persons; but it can no longer force people to aban- 
 don it. 
 
 ^Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggera- 
 tion that at present the preservation of marriage as 
 an institution is almost solely due to its tenacity as 
 an instinctive habit. I For while marriage is the 
 
74 Concerning Women 
 
 strongest bulwark of the State, the economic order 
 for the sake of which the State exists tends neverthe- 
 less to discourage marriage because it progressively 
 concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus de- 
 prives the great mass of people of adequate means to 
 rear and educate families. This condition is largely 
 responsible for the fact that celibacy, illegitimacy 
 and prostitution are on the increase in every civil- 
 ized country; and that the average age at which 
 marriage takes place tends steadily to become higher, 
 as it takes longer to get into an economic position 
 which makes possible the support of a family. In 
 this connexion, Katharine Anthony’s statement that 
 factory-girls and heiresses are the country’s young- 
 est brides is significant. Neither the heiress nor the 
 factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the 
 heiress already has economic security and the 
 factory-girl never will have it, for she and her hus- 
 band — if she marries in her own class — will always 
 be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the 
 labour-market.') It should also be remarked that 
 among the great middle class the standard of edu- 
 cation for both sexes, but more particularly for 
 women, is higher than among the very rich and the 
 
Institutional Marriage 75 
 
 very poor; and this tends to advance the average 
 age for marriage. 
 
 It tends as well to make children a heavy burden 
 on the parents. Among primitive peoples, where 
 difficulty in supporting a family is virtually un- 
 known, where adjustment to the environment offers 
 no complexities and childhood is therefore not so 
 prolonged, and where, moreover, children through 
 their labour become an economic asset, they are de- 
 sirable . 1 But in a civilized society where the paren- 
 tal sense of responsibility has developed to the point 
 -where the child is reared for its own sake, where 
 adaptation to the environment is a complex and 
 lengthy process involving expensive education and 
 prolonged dependence of the child upon the parents, 
 and where the difficulty of getting a start in life tends 
 also to lengthen the period of dependence ; in such a 
 society it is natural that the parental sense of re- 
 sponsibility should find expression in an artificial 
 limitation of offspring to the number that the cir- 
 cumstances of the parents will enable them to edu- 
 cate properly. There is a further step that this 
 feeling can suggest in these days of excessive eco- 
 
 1 According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes. 
 
76 Concerning Women 
 
 nomic exploitation and ruinous wars ; that is, refusal 
 to reproduce at all : and this step an increasing num- 
 ber of married people are taking, to the great dis- 
 tress of self-appointed guardians of our customs 
 and morals. 
 
 Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the 
 connexion between the economic condition of the 
 parents and the proper equipment of children for 
 making their way in life often leads to absurd con- 
 tradictions ; as for example in that staunch friend of 
 childhood, the late Ellen Key. No one is more in- 
 sistent than this writer upon the importance of rear- 
 ing the child for its own good; yet she gravely de- 
 clares that “from the point of view of the nation, 
 always from that of the childrefi, and most 
 frequently from that of the parents, the normal 
 condition must be, that the number of children shall 
 not fall short of three or four.” Miss Key’s pri- 
 mary failure is one that must be judged with great 
 severity because it is both fundamental and typical 
 — it pervades and vitiates the whole body of feminist 
 literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. 
 Miss Key is fully aware of a persistent economic dis- 
 location bearing on her thesis — “At present there 
 is a shortage of labour for those willing to work, of 
 
Institutional Marriage 77 
 
 food for the hungry, of educational advantages for 
 those thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the 
 sick, of care for the children. The circumstances 
 of the majority are now such as to produce, directly 
 or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity, consump- 
 tion, or sexual diseases in large sections of the pop- 
 ulation.” Again, “The struggle for daily bread, 
 the cares of livelihood . . . are now the stamp of 
 public as well as private life. . . . Married people 
 have no time to cultivate their feelings for one an- 
 other, . . . (Through the cares of livelihood parents 
 have no time to live with their children, to study 
 them in order to be able really to educate them.” 1 
 One must suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic 
 in the writer who recognizes such conditions and still 
 recommends three or four children as being the mini- 
 mum number that people should have who wish to 
 do their duty by their country, their children and 
 themselves. Miss Key has been content to shirk 
 Inquiry into the fundamental cause of these con- 
 ditions, and hence the means she recommends for 
 their cure are silly and feeble. An international 
 
 1 The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage” ; 
 the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Genera- 
 tion,” simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more 
 clearly and definitely expressed in that book than in the other. 
 
78 Concerning Women 
 
 universal organization which is to regulate all com- 
 petition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the 
 abolition of inheritances; the exercise of “collective 
 motherliness” in public affairs; these are some of 
 the means she offers for the regeneration of society. 
 Probably never since the remark attributed to Marie 
 Antoinette that if the starving populace could not 
 get bread they should eat cake, has ineptitude gone 
 further. If Miss Key’s call to duty were brought 
 to the attention of the well-to-do married couple of 
 the city of New York whose means are sufficient to 
 permit them to occupy an apartment of, let us say, 
 two or three or four rooms, often without kitchen, 
 they might agree with her in principle; but they 
 would probably not attempt to bring up three or 
 four children in such straitened surroundings and to 
 educate them over a long span of years, for a very 
 doubtful future. If this example seem special and 
 far-fetched, I would remind my readers that over 
 fifty per cent of people in this country are urban 
 dwellers, and that the vast majority of them are 
 worse off for dwelling space, not better, than the 
 hypothetical couple I have cited. 
 
 It is, of course, among those who are worse off 
 that children are most numerous. Ignorance and 
 
Institutional Marriage 
 
 79 
 
 religious scruples— tfor the Church is strongest 
 among the ignorant because of their ignoranceO- 
 combine to produce large families among the class 
 that can least afford them. For civilization, 
 although it denies these people most things, grants 
 them too great a fecundity. Among primitive peo- 
 ples fecundity is decreased by various causes, such 
 as excessively hard work, childbearing at a too early 
 age, and prolonged lactation during which contin- 
 ence is often the rule. The average number of chil- 
 dren borne by a savage does not often exceed five or 
 six, whereas the civilized woman may bear eighteen 
 or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional for the 
 woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among 
 west-side women of New York whom Katherine An- 
 thony questioned concerning frequency of pregnan- 
 cies, one reported fifteen in nineteen years, another 
 ten in twelve years, and another six in nine years. 
 Obviously, then, when eugenists and moralists de- 
 plore what they term the modern tendency to race- 
 suicide, they refer to the educated classes. The 
 moralist argues from prepossession and may be dis- 
 missed from consideration; but the eugenist has 
 scientific pretensions which are not without a certain 
 degree of validity and can therefore not be lightly 
 
80 Concerning Women 
 
 passed over. So long as he argues for improvement 
 in the quality of the race through the substitution of 
 intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he is 
 on solid ground : no one unprepossessed by the senti- 
 mentalism which regards legitimate children, how- 
 ever untoward be the circumstances of their birth 
 and breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can 
 deny that voluntary and intelligent attention to the 
 quality of offspring offers better prospects for civili- 
 zation than hit-or-miss quantity-production. The 
 eugenist deplores the fact that at present this exer- 
 cise of intelligence is confined to the comparatively 
 small class of the educated and well-to-do, and that 
 therefore the birth-rate among that class is all too 
 small to offset the unchecked propagation of the 
 ignorant and unfit. This is unfortunately true ; and 
 it suggests the obvious question: Why is there in 
 every modern State so large a class of ignorant and 
 unfit persons as to constitute a menace to the vitality 
 of that State? (if it is solely because the unfit are 
 allowed to propagate unchecked, then those eugen- 
 ists who advocate the sterilization of paupers and 
 imbeciles and the encouragement of propagation 
 among the intelligent classes by an elaborate system 
 of State subsidy, may be listened to with respect if 
 
Institutional Marriage 81 
 
 not with perfect faith in the practicability of their 
 proposals. ^ But how about that large mass of the 
 physically and mentally normal who live at the 
 subsistence-level, and whose progeny, if economic 
 pressure tighten a little, are likely to be forced down 
 into the class of underfed beings, dulled and brutal- 
 ized by poverty, from whose ranks our paupers, 
 imbeciles and criminals are largely recruited? To 
 ignore the existence of this perennial source of un- 
 fitness is levity. To recognize it, and to assume that 
 it results from over-propagation is to assume at the 
 same time that the earth’s population is too numerous 
 for comfortable subsistence on the amount of culti- 
 vable land in existence. If this disproportion be 
 real, the only hope lies in persuading this class to 
 limit its offspring voluntarily to the number that the 
 earth’s surface will comfortably support. If it be 
 only an apparent disproportion due to an artificial 
 shortage of land created by monopoly, then the 
 eugenist’s program amounts simply to a recom- 
 mendation that the population be somehow restricted 
 to the number that can get subsistence on the terms 
 of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively 
 disproved the validity of the Malthusian theory 
 which underlies the assumption of over-population, 
 
82 Concerning Women 
 
 while Oppenheimer’s figures show that if land were 
 freely available for use, the earth’s present popula- 
 tion might easily be supported on one-third of its 
 arable surface . 1 kHere, really, is the most convinc- 
 ing answer to the standard arguments for birth- 
 control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth- 
 control have never done much with it, whether out 
 of ignorance or because of the profound economic 
 readjustments that it implies. The eugenist, too, 
 generally displays a constitutional aversion to at- 
 tacking the problem of unfitness at the right end 
 — which is, to inquire, first of all, why it exists. 
 Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social bet- 
 terment: they would involve much unwieldy gov- 
 ernmental machinery and considerably more in- 
 telligence than any State has ever displayed in 
 dealing with social questions; and they would at- 
 tack only the results of our social ills, leaving the 
 causes freely operative . 2 
 
 While those causes continue to operate, the sup- 
 port of a family, save in the comparatively small 
 
 1 Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen 
 (Ekonomie. Berlin, 1912. 
 
 2 For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I 
 refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made 
 Plain.” 
 
Institutional Marriage 83 
 
 class of wealthy people, will be more or less of a 
 burden. At present, this burden bears most heavily 
 upon the middle-class man and the lower-class 
 woman. Meretricious standards of_ respectability, 
 among them (the idea that a married woman must 
 not work outside her home even when she is child- 
 less, tend to make marriage from the outset a burden 
 on the man of the middle class/) For it must be re- 
 membered that since the so-called feminine occupa- 
 tions have been taken out of the home, a man no 
 longer gains an economic asset in taking unto him- 
 self a wife. Rather, he assumes a liability. This 
 is especially true among the middle classes, where 
 social standing has come to be gauged to some extent 
 by the degree in which wives are economically un- 
 productive?^ It is a commonplace in this country 
 that women form the leisure class; and this leisure 
 class of women, like leisured classes everywhere, 
 has its leisure at the expense of other people, who 
 in this case are the husbands!) Moreover, it is 
 among the middle classes that the standards of edu- 
 cation are highest and the rearing of children there- 
 fore most expensive; and this burden is usually 
 borne by the husband alone. Hence the emergence 
 of the type of harassed pater familias at whom our 
 
 V 
 
84 Concerning Women 
 
 comic artists poke much sympathetic fun, who meets 
 his family now and then on Sundays, foots their 
 bills, and is rewarded for his unremitting toil in 
 their behalf by being regarded much in the light 
 of a cash-register. 
 
 This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable 
 rule. There are many middle-class women who 
 give their families untiring service, and an increas- 
 ing number who, either from choice or necessity, en- 
 gage in gainful occupations outside their homes, 
 j Of this country’s eight and one half million women 
 breadwinners, two million are married; and it may 
 be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the 
 middle classT) The great majority, however, are 
 of the labouring class; and upon these, economic 
 injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women 
 who bear most children; and it is they who, when 
 their husbands are unable or unwilling to meet the 
 growing expenses of the family, assume the double 
 burden of “woman’s work” in the home and what- 
 ever they can get to do outside that will enable 
 them to earn a few dollars a week, in order to “keep 
 the family together.^ Miss Katharine Anthony, in 
 her book, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” gives a strik- 
 ing picture of the unskilled married women workers 
 
Institutional Marriage 85 
 
 of west-side New York, victims of a crowded labour- 
 market, who take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, 
 in order that they may give some few poor advan- 
 tages to the children they have brought into the 
 world unwillingly, knowing that they could not af- 
 ford them. “The same mother,” says Miss An- 
 thony, “who resents the coming of children and re- 
 signs them so apathetically to death, will toil 
 fourteen hours a day and seven days a week to keep 
 up a home for the young lives in her charge.” 
 
 Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind 
 from governmental investigators, somehow makes 
 the general run of social criticism appear frivolous 
 and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn 
 with excessive childbearinlg, who still finds strength 
 to work long hours in laundry or factory during 
 the day and do her housework at night, hardly fits 
 into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wil- 
 fully deserting their proper sphere of domesticity 
 either to seek pleasure or to maintain their economic 
 independence. Indeed, the idea of economic inde- 
 pendence is quite at variance with her notions of 
 respectability. “Not to work,” says Miss Anthony, 
 “is a mark of the middle-class married woman, and 
 the ambitious west-side family covets that mark. 
 
86 Concerning Women 
 
 Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother’s em- 
 ployment, if she has one, which is one of the little 
 snobberies of the poor.” The sole object of these 
 women’s toil is to preserve the home, chief prop of 
 a social order which bears upon it with crushing 
 weight; and their adherence to a social philosophy 
 which regards the preservation of the home as 
 peculiarly the business of women is evident in the 
 fact that they contribute the whole of their meagre 
 earnings to its upkeep, whereas their husbands are 
 likely to contribute only as much of their own earn- 
 ings as they see fit. 
 
 It goes without saying that the conditions I have 
 cited have a profound effect on the psychology of 
 parents, and therefore on the lives of children. The 
 rearing of children, if justice is to be done them, 
 is one of the most exacting tasks that can be under- 
 taken. The adjustment that is required to fit par- 
 ents to the personalities of their children and chil- 
 dren to those of their parents and of one another, 
 is in itself a most delicate and difficult process, and 
 one upon which the nature of the child’s adjustment 
 to the larger world greatly depends. Such a process 
 naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is 
 to be successful, calls for no little tact and patience 
 
Institutional Marriage 87 
 
 in the parents; and cramped quarters, sordid pov- 
 erty, and exhausting labour are hardly conducive to 
 the possession of either of these qualities. Children 
 of the middle class, it is remarked often enough, 
 hardly know their harassed, overworked fathers; 
 but children of the labouring class are likely to know 
 neither of their parents, or to know them only as 
 fretful, quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. 
 “The strain of bringing up a family on the average 
 workingman’s wage,” says Miss Anthony, “reduced 
 as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness, or 
 drink, constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tene- 
 ment mother’s life. It is not strange that the good 
 will existing between husband and wife often gives 
 way beneath it. ‘I tell my husband,’ said Mrs. 
 Gurney, ‘it’s not right for us to be quarreling all the 
 time before the children. But it seems like we can’t 
 help it. He’s so worried all the time and I’m so 
 tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn’t 
 do it.’ ” 
 
 Nor do the children of these people have anything 
 much better to look forward to than such a lot as 
 that of their parents, for poverty drives them too into 
 the labour-market as soon as they are old enough to 
 earn, to the profound distress of reformers who 
 
88 Concerning Women 
 
 refuse to face the basic question of child-labour, 
 namely: whether it is better for human beings, even 
 if they be children, to work for their living or to 
 starve. This applies not only to the children of our 
 industrial labouring classes, but to those of the ag- 
 ricultural labourer and the tenant-farmer, who pay 
 the same penalty for the exploitation of their par- 
 ents. There is no little irony in the fact that out* 
 growing consciousness of the right of children to 
 be well bom and well reared proceeds hand in hand 
 with an economic injustice which renders it im- 
 possible to secure that right for all children, 
 dlf responsibility for the upbringing of children is 
 to continue to be vested in the family, then the rights 
 of children will be secured only when parents are 
 able to make a living for their families with so little 
 difficulty that they may give their best thought and 
 energy to the child’s development and the problem 
 of helping it to adjust itself to the complexities of 
 the modern environment."") Such a condition is not 
 utopian, but quite possible of attainment, as X shall 
 show later. But for the present, and for some time 
 to come, marriage and parenthood will continue to 
 make men and women virtual slaves of the economic 
 order which they help to perpetuate. Small won- 
 
Institutional Marriage 89 
 
 der that the women of whom Miss Anthony writes 
 are thoroughly disillusioned concerning “marriage/ 
 life,” and would avoid it if they “had it to do over.”) 
 Marriage as an institution has little to offer these 
 people save toil and suffering; it is, as I have re- 
 marked, its tenacity as an instinctive habit that 
 makes them its victims. And if it were not for the 
 responsibilities that marriage entails, responsibilities 
 which make people fearful of the economic uncer- 
 tainty involved in revolutionary change, the eco- 
 nomic order that makes marriage “an instrument 
 of torture” and thwarts the development of children, 
 would not last overnight. 
 
 Both as a personal relationship and as an in- 
 stitution, marriage is at present undergoing a pro- 
 found modification resulting from the changing 
 industrial and social position of women. The ele- 
 vation of woman from the position of a chattel to 
 that of a free citizen must inevitably affect the in- 
 stitution in which her subordinate position has been 
 most strongly emphasized — which has been, indeed, 
 the chief instrument of her subordination. The 
 woman who is demanding her rightful place in the 
 world as man’s equal, can no longer be expected to 
 accept without question an institution under whose 
 
90 Concerning Women 
 
 rules she is obliged to remain the victim of injus- 
 tice."') There is every reason therefore, assuming that 
 the process of emancipation shall not be interrupted, 
 to expect a continuous alteration in the laws and 
 customs bearing on marriage, until some adjustment 
 shall be reached which allows scope for the indi- 
 viduality of both parties, instead of one only. The 
 psychological conflict involved in the adaptation of 
 marriage to woman’s changing position and the 
 changing mentality that results from it, is not to be 
 underrated. At present the process of adjustment is 
 needlessly complicated and this attendant conflict 
 immensely exaggerated, by an economic injustice 
 which bears most heavily on married people. In- 
 dividualism is developing in modern society to such 
 an extent that marriage based on anything but af- 
 fection seems degrading; but economic injustice is 
 progressing simultaneously with such strides that 
 marriage based on nothing but affection is likely 
 to end in disaster; for affection and the harassment 
 of poverty are hardly compatible. If this compli- 
 cation were removed, as it could be, we should prob- 
 ably find that the adjustment of marriage to shifting 
 ideals and conditions would come about in a natural 
 
Institutional Marriage 91 
 
 and advantageous manner, as adjustments usually 
 do when vexing and hampering conditions are re- 
 moved. The question will settle itself in any case. 
 Just how, no one, of course, can tell; but however 
 revolutionary the adaptation to new conditions may 
 be, it will not seem revolutionary to the people of 
 the future because “the minds of men will be fitted 
 to it.” This is an all-important fact, and one that 
 is too little respected; for the desire to enforce our 
 own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is 
 quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon 
 contemporaries. It is a desire which finds a large 
 measure of fulfilment — where is the society which 
 does not struggle along under a dead weight of 
 tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers? 
 All political and religious systems have their root 
 and their strength in the innate conservatism of the 
 human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy. 
 Because of this conservatism, people never move 
 towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by 
 intolerable injustices in the economic and social 
 order under which they live. There were, and are, 
 such injustices in the laws and customs of the Chris- 
 tian world governing marriage and the relations of 
 
92 Concerning Women 
 
 the sexes ; hence the changes which have already be- 
 gun, and may conceivably proceed until they shall 
 prove as far-reaching as those by which marriage 
 in the past was transformed from an instinctive 
 habit into an institution subject to regulation by 
 everyone except the two people most intimately con- 
 cerned. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WOMAN AND MARRIAGE 
 I 
 
 Perhaps the most pronounced conventional dis- 
 tinction between the sexes is made in their relation 
 to marriage. For man, marriage is regarded as a 
 state; for woman, as a vocation. For man, it is 
 a means of ordering his life and perpetuating his 
 name, for woman it is considered a proper and fitting 
 aim of existence. This conventional view is yield- 
 ing before the changing attitude of women toward 
 themselves; but it will be long before it ceases to 
 colour the instinctive attitude of the great majority of 
 people toward women. It is because of the usual 
 assumption that marriage is woman’s special prov- 
 ince, that I have discussed its general aspect some- 
 what at length before considering its relation to 
 women in particular. This assumption, I may 
 remark, has been justified expressly or by implica- 
 tion by all those advocates of freedom for women 
 who have assured the world that woman’s “mission” 
 
 93 
 
94 Concerning Women 
 
 of wifehood and motherhood would be better ful- 
 filled rather than worse through an extension of her 
 rights. If we imagine the signers of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, in place of proclaiming the 
 natural right of all men to life, liberty, and the pur- 
 suit of happiness, arguing with King George that a 
 little more freedom would make them better hus- 
 bands and fathers, we shall imagine a pretty exact 
 parallel for this kind of argument on behalf of the 
 emancipation of women. 
 
 /The belief that marriage and parenthood are the 
 especial concern of women is rooted in the idea that 
 the individual exists for the sake of the species^ 
 Biologically, this is of course true; but it is equally 
 true of male and female. Among primitive peo- 
 ples, where individuation has not progressed as far 
 as among more highly civilized peoples, this idea 
 still prevails in regard to both sexes. Among these 
 peoples the man who must remain unmarried 
 and childless is considered quite as unfortunate as 
 the woman who suffers the same fate. Among 
 civilized peoples, on the other hand, where indi- 
 viduation has progressed farthest, it is not usual 
 ito look upon the male as existing solely for the 
 species; but it is usual for the female to be so re- 
 
Woman and Marriage 95 
 
 garded, because, having had less freedom than the 
 male, she has not been able to assert to the same 
 extent her right to live for herself. The one-sided 
 view that the future of the race depends solely on 
 women has curious results: a nation may send the 
 best of its male youth to be destroyed in war without 
 overmuch anxiety being manifested in any quarter 
 over the effect of this wholesale slaughter upon fu- 
 ture generations; but if the idea of enlisting women 
 in military service be so much as broached, there is 
 an immediate outcry about the danger to posterity 
 that such a course would involve) Yet it requires 
 only a moderate exercise of intelligence to perceive 
 that if there must be periodic slaughter it would be 
 better, both for the survivors and for posterity, if the 
 sexes were to be slaughtered in equal numbers ; and 
 more especially is this true, for obvious reasons, 
 where monogamy is the accepted form of marriage. 
 Again, although it is extremely hard to get laws 
 passed to protect men from the hazards of indus- 
 try, the laws designed to protect women — i. e., pos- 
 terity — which have been passed at the instance of 
 reformers and social workers, already constitute a 
 serious handicap to women workers in their neces- 
 sary competition with men in the labour-market. 
 
96 Concerning Women 
 
 Yet every child must have two parents, and cer- 
 tainly unfitness or disability in the father must have 
 a bad effect upon his offspring, even though it be less 
 harmful than unfitness or disability in the mother^ 
 
 The view of woman as a biological function might 
 be strongly defended on the ground of racial strength 
 if that function were respected and she were free in 
 discharging it. But it is not respected and she is not 
 free. The same restrictions that have kept her 
 in the status of a function have denied her freedom 
 and proper respect even in the exercise of that 
 function. Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great 
 deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is com- 
 mitted in accordance with rules which have been 
 prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. 
 Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. (jVh en 
 it results from a sexual relationship which has been 
 duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no 
 matter how much it may transgress the rules of 
 decency, health, or common sense.,' Otherwise it is 
 a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and 
 obloquy for the child — an ostracism and an obloquy, 
 significantly enough, in which the father does not 
 share. 
 
 The motives behind the universal condemnation 
 
Woman and Marriage 97 
 
 of extra-legal motherhood are various and complex ; 
 but I believe it is safe to say that the strongest is 
 masculine jealousy. Motherhood out of wedlock 
 constitutes a defiance of that theory of male pro- 
 prietorship on which most societies are based ; it im- 
 plies on the part of woman a seizure of sexual free- 
 dom which, if it were countenanced, would threaten 
 the long-established dominance of the male in sex- 
 ual matters, a dominance which has been enforced 
 by imposing all manner of unnatural social and le- 
 gal disabilities upon women, such, for example, 
 as the demand for virginity before marriage and 
 chastity after it. The woman who bears an illegi- 
 timate child violates one of these two restrictions. 
 On the other hand, the man who begets an illegi- 
 timate child violates no such restriction, for society 
 demands of him neither virginity nor chastity; 
 therefore he is not only not punished by social os- 
 tracism, but he is often protected by law from being 
 found out . 1 
 
 The fact that paternity may so easily be doubtful 
 furnishes a strong motive for the attempt to enforce 
 
 1 Code Napoleon: “La recherche de la paternile est interdite ” 
 This provision was expunged in 1913. In Massachusetts, the father’s 
 name may not be given in the record of birth except on the written 
 request of both father and mother. No similar protection against 
 publicity is provided for the mother. 
 
98 Concerning W omen 
 
 chastity upon women; but that this is not so potent 
 as the idea of male proprietorship is evident from 
 the practice which exists in many primitive societies, 
 and appears formerly to have existed in Europe, of 
 lending wives to visitors, as a mark of hospitality. 
 Adultery thus imposed on a woman by her husband 
 is not only regarded as quite proper, but the children 
 that may result are considered his legitimate off- 
 spring. The superstitious notion that a woman’s 
 honour is a matter of sex, and that she can not be 
 considered virtuous if her sex-life is not conducted in 
 accordance with regulations imposed by organized 
 society, also has something to do with the disgrace 
 that attaches to illegitimate motherhood; but of 
 course this superstition itself has its source in mas- 
 culine dominance. Indeed, there is no need to em- 
 phasize the fact that the whole mass of taboo and 
 discrimination arrayed against the unwedded mother 
 and her child is the direct result of the subjection of 
 women; for in a society where women dominated — 
 or even where they were the equals of men — illegiti- 
 macy would either not exist at all, or its consequences 
 would be made to bear either upon the father or 
 upon both parents equally. This may seem an ex- 
 travagant statement in view of the harshness with 
 
Woman and Marriage 99 
 
 which women themselves are prone to treat the un- 
 married mother. But it should not be forgotten that 
 women are what the procrustean adaptations of a 
 factitious morality have made them. They have 
 'been taught to believe that motherhood out of wed- 
 lock is a cardinal sin, and the value and fragility of 
 reputation have been effective hindrances to any im- 
 pulse of lenience toward the sinner. Their attitude, 
 moreover, has been tinged with a feeling that may 
 be termed professional. Marriage has been, gener- 
 ally speaking, the only profession open to them; 
 their living and their social position have depended 
 on it, and still do in great measure; therefore the 
 woman who commits a sexual irregularity acts un- 
 professionally, somewhat as the trader who smuggles 
 wares into a tariff ridden country and undercuts his 
 competitors. The position of the unmarried mother 
 is analogous to that of the married mother in certain 
 societies of which I have already spoken, whose 
 children are considered illegitimate because she has 
 not been bought. Even the prostitute, although she 
 is a social outcast, is sooner tolerated, because while 
 prostitution, like marriage, has been established on 
 a commercial basis, it is a non-competing institution. 
 It does not impair the economic value of the 
 
ioo Concerning Women 
 
 “virtuous” woman’s chief asset. Prostitution is 
 condoned as a protective concession to the postulated 
 sexual needs of men; the prostitute has been justi- 
 fied, and even praised in a back-handed way, as . 
 “the most efficient guardian of virtue”; 1 that is to 
 say, of the arbitrary restraints on women which 
 pass for virtue in a society where woman is the 
 repository of morality. Illegitimacy, on the other 
 hand, or at least that large share of it which implies 
 a fall from conventional virtue, is an embarrassing 
 suggestion of sexual need in woman. Therefore, 
 it is a disturbing phenomenon, intimating as it does 
 to virtuous women that the duplex morality to which 
 their freedom is sacrificed is unnatural and un- 
 workable. 
 
 There is a sense, of course, in which extra-legal 
 motherhood is, if not sinful, at least unjust. The 
 mother knows that the child she bears out of wed- 
 lock will be forced, although innocent, to share with 
 her in the world’s displeasure at her defiance of con- 
 ventional taboo, and that the sneers of its legiti- 
 mately born playmates may have a blighting effect 
 upon its spiritual development. She knows also, 
 unless she be well-to-do or especially well qualified 
 
 1 Lecky, “History of European Morals.” Chapter V. 
 
Woman and Marriage ioi 
 
 to earn, that her child will be at a disadvantage from 
 the start in the matter of livelihood and education 
 unless the father be willing — or required by law — 
 to contribute to its support. There is likely to be a 
 grim consistency in legal injustices. Sometimes 
 the denial of one right makes expedient the denial 
 of another, as when the poor, having been reduced 
 by legalized privilege to want and squalor, are 
 legally deprived of the alcohol with which they in- 
 crease their wretchedness in an attempt to find for- 
 getfulness of their misery. The denial to women 
 of economic opportunity has made expedient denial 
 of freedom in performing the function of mother- 
 hood. (_Men, having enjoyed a virtual monopoly of 
 earning power, have been regarded as the natural 
 providers for women and children; therefore a 
 woman has been required to get a legal provider 
 before she could legally get a child; and if one 
 accepted her legal disabilities without questioning 
 their justice, this restraint might appear quite jus- 
 tifiable. ) This may be taken as an argument for 
 weakness or wantonness in the unmarried mother. 
 If so, it must certainly apply with equal force to 
 the unmarried father — with double force indeed, for 
 he knows that his act will not only add to the dif- 
 
102 Concerning Women 
 
 ficulties, numerous enough under the best circum- 
 stances, that his child will have to contend with, but 
 that it means social ostracism for the mother. Thus 
 every illegitimate child, as society is at present con- 
 stituted, is the victim not only of social but of 
 parental injustice. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to discuss further the eco- 
 nomic aspects of the question. In a society where 
 economic opportunity is pretty well monopolized 
 by men, the task of the mother with children to sup- 
 port is, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, 
 extremely difficult; and it may even be rendered 
 impossible where the disgrace of unmarried mother- 
 hood decreases such comparatively slight opportu- 
 nity as industry, even now, offers a woman^ The 
 effect of this disability' shows clearly in any com- 
 parison of the death-rates among legitimate and 
 illegitimate babies. The rate among illegitimate 
 children is often twice as high as that among chil- 
 dren born in wedlock. Truly marriage is an in- 
 valuable protection to motherhood and childhood in 
 a society which denies them any other. 
 
 Instead of joining in the universal condemnation 
 of illegitimacy, it seems more reasonable to question 
 the ethics of a society which permits it to exist. 
 
Woman and Marriage 103 
 
 Certainly no social usage could be more degrading 
 to women as mothers of the race than that which 
 makes it a sin to bear a child ; and nothing could be 
 more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, re- 
 inforced by laws, which relieves men from respon- 
 sibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same 
 acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitu- 
 tion and self-destruction. I know of no word that 
 may be said in justification of such a code or of a 
 society that tolerates it. As marriage ceases to be 
 a vested interest with women, and as their growing 
 freedom enables them to perceive the insult to their 
 humanity that this kind of morality involves, they 
 will refuse to stand for it. Those who prefer to 
 regard woman as a function will devote their energy 
 to securing conditions under which she may bear and 
 bring up children with a greater degree of freedom 
 and self-respect than conventional morality allows 
 her. As for those who prefer to regard her as a 
 human being, they will naturally demand the aboli- 
 tion of all discriminations based on sex; while all 
 women must certainly repudiate the barbarous in- 
 justice of organized society to the illegitimate child. 
 
 This is hardly to be regarded as a prophecy, for 
 the revolt has already begun. A small minority of 
 
104 Concerning Women 
 
 women in Europe have for some time been denounc- 
 ing this injustice, the most prominent among them 
 being the famous Swedish champion of childhood, 
 Ellen Key? Their influence has already been re- 
 flected in the laws of several countries. In Scandi- 
 navia, in Switzerland, and even in France, laws 
 have already been enacted either removing or modi- 
 fying the legal disabilities of the child born out of 
 wedlock, and fixing the responsibilities of the father. 
 There are similar laws in Australia and New Zea- 
 land. These laws vary in scope, but their gen- 
 eral tendency is toward the abolition of illegitimacy 
 and recognition of joint parental responsibility for 
 every child brought into the world. In this coun- 
 try, where unjust legal discriminations against un- 
 married mothers and their children are still in force, 
 the Woman’s Party is demanding laws recognizing 
 every child as legitimate, and determining the re- 
 sponsibilities of unmarried parents. The abolition 
 of illegitimacy will naturally mean that the child of 
 unmarried parents will have the same right to the 
 father’s name, and to support and inheritance, as 
 the child born in wedlock. 
 
 There is a general impression, to which I have 
 adverted, that marriage is a great protection to 
 
Woman and Marriage 105 
 
 women. Bachofen and his followers even went so 
 far as to suppose that she herself originally devised 
 it for that purpose. This school quite overlooked 
 the fact that in so far as it has been a protection it 
 has been so only because society has been inimical 
 to her interests, and has allowed her no other de- 
 fence against itself. Marriage has certainly not 
 protected her in the past from hard labour, cruelty, 
 and mental and spiritual deterioration. In spite 
 of these well-known facts, the notion persists that 
 it is of inestimable benefit to her; and those in- 
 fluenced by this superstition are likely to fear that 
 to abolish illegitimacy, with its humiliating conse- 
 quences, will be to encourage “free love” and thus to 
 expose women to victimization by unscrupulous men. 
 Such a view not only carries an untenable assump- 
 tion of feminine inferiority, but it carries an equally 
 untenable assumption that marriage constitutes a 
 protection against victimization by unscrupulous 
 men. Not only did our marriage-laws until re- 
 cently give a woman into the absolute power of her 
 husband, however unscrupulous he might be, but 
 they left her no way of escape. On the other hand, 
 they protected the husband’s sexual monopoly of his 
 wife and his right to be considered the only legal 
 
io6 Concerning Women 
 
 parent of their children. Indeed, the law has gone 
 further; it has exposed women to victimization by 
 protecting men from detection in illegitimate parent- 
 age. Laws equalizing the responsibilities of men 
 and women towards illegitimate children, will re- 
 duce temptation to unscrupulous conduct, for men 
 will be aware that if it result in the birth of a child 
 they will be obliged to acknowledge their parent- 
 hood and assume the attendant responsibilities?'! 
 
 I might remark here that some communities have 
 tried to deal with this question in what seems to 
 me a very bungling manner, namely: by forcing 
 the “seducer” of a woman under the legal age of 
 consent to choose between marrying her and going 
 to jail. Such laws represent concessions to tradi- 
 tional prejudices, and have little relation either to 
 justice or common sense. They take no cognizance 
 of the inclination of the parties or their fitness for 
 marriage; hence they afford a stupid way of legiti- 
 mizing the child. It would be much more sensible 
 to regard every child as legitimate by the very fact 
 of having arrived in the world, and to demand of 
 its parents a full discharge of parental responsibil- 
 ity, without complicating it with the very different 
 question of marital obligations. Another legal pro- 
 
Woman and Marriage 107 
 
 vision which is as general as it is humiliating to 
 women is that which permits a father to recover 
 damages from the seducer of his daughter. This 
 law, which is in force in several of our States, is 
 supposed to find justification in the daughter’s status 
 as a servant in her father’s house; but since the law 
 grants him no similar redress for the seduction of a 
 servant who is not his daughter, it is evident that 
 its real basis is in a surviving notion of woman as 
 the natural property of a male owner. These 
 laws do not lessen the disgrace that attaches 
 to extra-legal birth; rather they recognize and en- 
 dorse it. 
 
 The importance of abolishing illegitimacy is not 
 to be underrated, for it means the removal of the 
 legal sanctions which have enforced a barbarous 
 custom. But the abolition of illegitimacy can not be 
 expected entirely to remove the stigma attaching 
 to unmarried motherhood and birth out of wedlock. 
 That will disappear only when the economic inde- 
 pendence of women shall have resulted in a spiritual 
 independence which will lead them to examine criti- 
 cally the social dogmas that have been forced upon 
 them, and to repudiate those which conflict with jus- 
 tice. In other words, it will involve an adapta- 
 
108 Concerning Women 
 
 tion to more humane ethical standards; an adapta- 
 tion which has begun but may be long in reaching 
 completion, for superstition and taboo are not easily 
 eradicated. 
 
 II 
 
 The assumption that justice to motherhood and 
 childhood will undermine the institution of mar'- 
 riage implies that marriage as an institution is based 
 on injustice7|which is to assume that it is fundamen- 
 tally unsound. That it does, under present eco- 
 nomic conditions, involve serious injustice to both 
 sexes I have shown- in the preceding chapter. But 
 this notion implies something more: it implies that 
 marriage is acceptable to women only or chiefly be- 
 cause it offers them a position of privilege — the priv- 
 ilege of exemption from the social and economic 
 consequences of illegitimate motherhood. / 1 There is 
 some show of reason in this; for the disabilities 
 which marriage puts on women are in most com- 
 munities humiliating and onerous, more particularly 
 since the unmarried woman has so generally suc- 
 ceeded in establishing her right to be treated as a 
 free agent. The abolition of illegitimacy may 
 
Woman and Marriage 109 
 
 conceivably undermine institutional marriage; yet 
 hardly before women are economically free. For 
 her need of society’s protection against itself 
 in the discharge of her maternal function has 
 certainly had less to do with woman’s long ac- 
 quiescence in the disabilities which marriage in- 
 volves than the fact that marriage offered the only 
 career which society approved for her or gave her 
 much opportunity to pursue. She was under 
 enormous economic and social pressure to accept 
 those disabilities, and she yielded, precisely as thou- 
 sands of men who have been under analogous pres- 
 sure to get their living under humiliating conditions, 
 have yielded, rather than not get it at all. 
 
 Since we have been discussing unmarried mother- 
 hood, we may appropriately begin our consideration 
 of these disabilities by examining the status of 
 motherhood in marriage. The married mother, 
 particularly in modern times, is the object of a sickly 
 pawing and adulation and enjoys a certain formal 
 respect — not, however, as a mother, but as a mother 
 Of legitimate children. While she continues to live 
 with her husband, she may exercise considerable 
 supervision over the rearing of her offspring; in- 
 deed in some communities she is, by force of cus- 
 
no Concerning Women 
 
 tom, supreme in this province. But in case of sep- 
 aration or the death of her husband, she may find 
 herself without any legal claim to their guardian- 
 ship or custody, for until recently children born in 
 wedlock have been generally held to belong exclu- 
 sively to the father. The principle of joint guar- 
 dianship is coming to be recognized in modern 
 jurisprudence, but there are communities where the 
 old laws still hold. In Virginia, for example, the 
 father’s claim is always preferred to that of the 
 mother. In Maryland and Delaware it is preferred 
 to such an extent that he may even, by his will, de- 
 prive her of the guardianship and custody of her 
 children after his death. This provision is a sur- 
 vival from English common law, and is a logical 
 correlative of woman’s status under that law, which 
 was that of a minor. Her position with regard to 
 her children was one of responsibilities with no com- 
 pensating rights; and although the discriminations 
 against her have been modified here and there, this 
 is still pretty generally her position. In this respect 
 the unmarried mother is better off than the mother 
 of legitimate children, for in most countries, as the 
 only legal parent of her child, she exercises the right 
 of guardianship and control and possesses full 
 
Woman and Marriage ill 
 
 claim to their services and earnings. (The unmar- 
 
 ried mother, in a word, bears her own children; the 
 married mother bears the children of her husbanc 
 
 Usage, as every one knows, is far ahead of the 
 
 laws governing the rights of the married mother. 
 In France, where her legal position is notoriously 
 bad, her relation to her family is nevertheless one 
 of influence and authority. In this country also 
 her actual position is generally far better than that 
 allowed her by the law. But this is merely to say 
 that most husbands are more humane than the law; 
 and the fact may not be ignored that so long as 
 legal discriminations bar her from an equal share 
 with her husband in the control and guardianship 
 of her children, she exercises parental rights only on 
 sufferance. 1 It is the law which finally fixes her 
 status in this as in other matters ; and as long as she 
 may legally be made to suffer injustice on account of 
 her sex, she can hardly be called her husband’s 
 equal, no matter what privileges she may enjoy by 
 virtue of his indulgence. 
 
 So much for the disabilities of the married 
 mother. Her compensations are the immunity that 
 marriage affords her from society’s displeasure and 
 consequent persecution; the inestimable advantage 
 
1 12 Concerning Women 
 
 of her husband’s co-operation in making a home 
 for her children, and in rearing and educating them; 
 and the fact that they have a legal claim upon him 
 for support and inheritance. 
 
 Her own claim for support does not depend, in 
 law, upon her motherhood, but upon her wifehood. 
 She is entitled to support whether she has children 
 or not. On the other hand the law, in most com- 
 munities, allows her nothing more than mere sup- 
 port, while at the same time it maintains certain re- 
 strictions upon her economic independence. Al- 
 though most States now allow the wife to control her 
 own earnings in industry, her services in the home 
 are still pretty generally her husband’s property, and 
 any savings that result from economy in her domes- 
 tic management belong to him, and so does any 
 money earned by her in her own house, as from 
 taking in boarders or lodgers. In short, while she 
 works in the home her status is that of her husband’s 
 servant . 1 He may even, as in Michigan, still pre- 
 vent her from undertaking employment outside the 
 
 1 A recent decision in the State of New York declared that a 
 husband is not required to fulfil his promise to return money loaned 
 him by his wife, when she has accumulated it through economy in 
 her housekeeping; because every saving of the kind is the property 
 of the husband, as are the services of the wife. The wife has no 
 money of her own. 
 
Woman and Marriage 113 
 
 home, simply by withholding his consent. Nor is 
 this the only way in which the opportunities of a 
 married woman are restricted. She is frequently 
 disqualified by her status for engaging in business 
 on her own account, or for doing so without her 
 husband’s consent. She may also be disqualified 
 by law or prejudice for engaging in certain profes- 
 sions, such as teaching, an occupation in which, 
 strangely enough, a married woman is frequently 
 held to be incapable. 
 
 The claim for alimony which at present constitutes 
 such a fecund source of injustice to men and corrup- 
 tion among women, implies the assumption that a 
 woman is economically helpless, that she is a natural 
 dependent whose support, having been undertaken 
 by her husband, must be continued even after di- 
 vorce, until she dies or finds another husband to 
 support her. It does not take into account the 
 woman’s rightful claim to any property that she 
 may have helped her husband to accumulate, for 
 the question whether or not she shall receive alimony 
 is within the discretion of the court. On the other 
 hand, the awarding of alimony may give a woman 
 a claim to income from property possessed by her 
 husband before marriage and therefore not right- 
 
1 14 Concerning Women 
 
 fully to be enjoyed by her; it may, furthermore, give 
 her an equally unjustifiable lien on his future earn- 
 ings. Thus it allows women at once too little and 
 too much. If the community is to continue to fix the 
 economic obligations which marriage shall entail, it 
 might be fairer to both sexes if those obligations 
 were fixed as they have been in certain of our West- 
 ern States. In those States, property acquired dur- 
 ing marriage is regarded as common property, and 
 in case of separation must be divided equally. 
 Neither party may, during the marriage, dispose of 
 such property without consent of the other ; nor may 
 either party dispose of more than half of it by will. 
 On the other hand, either party has free disposal of 
 property acquired before marriage, or inherited 
 during marriage. In case one party dies intestate, 
 the other shares equally with children in his or her 
 half of the common property, and in other property. 
 Thus the law raises woman above the status of a 
 dependent and recognizes marriage as an equal 
 partnership. Such laws, of course, do not fit all 
 cases, for all marriages are by no means equal 
 partnerships; but so long as the State insists upon 
 maintaining a blanket-regulation of the marital rela- 
 tion, some such arrangement would seem to be more 
 
Woman and Marriage 115 
 
 nearly just, both to men and women, than the laws 
 now in force in most communities. 
 
 I have given only a partial list of the economic 
 disabilities enforced upon a good many millions of 
 married women. Their status in the various coun- 
 tries of the civilized world ranges all the way from 
 complete subjection to their husbands to complete 
 equality with them . 1 The subjection of women, 
 like all slavery, has been enforced by legally estab- 
 lished economic disadvantages; and upon the mar- 
 ried woman these disadvantages, or some of them, 
 are still binding in most communities. The law de- 
 prived her of the right to her own property and her 
 own labour, and in return gave her a claim upon 
 her husband for bare subsistence, which is the claim 
 of a serf. Since woman’s partial emergence from 
 her subjection, and the consequent modification of 
 the discriminations against her, laws which were 
 logical and effective when her status was that of a 
 chattel have been allowed to survive other laws which 
 made them necessary. The result is a grotesque 
 hodge-podge of illogical and contradictory provi- 
 sions which involve injustice to both sexes, and 
 
 1 The State of Wisconsin has made men and women equal before 
 the law. 
 
n6 Concerning Women 
 
 should be abolished by the simple expedient of mak- 
 ing men and women equal in all respects before the 
 law, and sweeping away all legal claims which they 
 now exercise against one another by virtue of the 
 marriage-bond. 
 
 This would mean, of course, that a woman might 
 no longer legally claim support from her husband 
 by virtue of her wifehood ; nor should she in fairness 
 ■be able to do so when all his claims to her property 
 and services had been abolished. There is no rea- 
 son why the disabilities which marriage imposes 
 on women should be done away with and those 
 which it imposes on men retained. To take such 
 a course would be to turn the tables and place women 
 in a position of privilege. The fact that women 
 are still at considerable disadvantage in the indus- 
 trial world might appear to justify such a position; 
 but there is a better way of dealing with their 
 economic handicaps than the way of penalizing hus- 
 bands and demoralizing a large number of women 
 by degrading marriage, for them, to the level of a 
 means of livelihood, gained sometimes through vir- 
 tual blackmail. Given complete equality of the 
 sexes, so that prejudice may no longer avail itself 
 of legal sanction for excluding women from the 
 
Woman and Marriage 117 
 
 occupations in which they may elect to engage, the 
 economic handicaps from which they may still suffer 
 will be those resulting from the overcrowded condi- 
 tion of the general labour-market. The ultimate 
 emancipation of woman, then, will depend not upon 
 the abolition of the restrictions which have subjected 
 her to man — that is but a step, though a necessary 
 one — but upon the abolition of all those restrictions 
 of natural human rights that subject the mass of 
 humanity to a privileged class. 
 
 This phase of woman’s problem is the main thesis 
 of my book; and since it will come in for detailed 
 consideration in subsequent chapters, I leave it for 
 the present and proceed to discuss some probable re- 
 sults of sex-equality and the removal of legal 
 claims which marriage now gives husband and wife 
 against one another. 
 
 The wife would no longer be humiliated by the as- 
 sumption that as a married woman she is the natural 
 inferior of her husband, and entitled to society’s 
 protection against the extreme results of the disabili- 
 ties that her status involves. If she became his 
 housekeeper, she would do so by free choice, and 
 not because her services were his legal property; 
 and her resultant claim on his purse would be fixed 
 
n8 Concerning Women 
 
 by mutual arrangement rather than by laws allowing 
 her the claims of a serf. The marriage, if it be- 
 came an economic partnership, would be so by 
 mutual consent and arrangement, and would thus 
 no longer be a one-sided contract, legally defined, 
 in which all the rights were on the side of the hus- 
 band, but compensated in too many cases by unjust 
 
 privileges 
 
 same time, 
 
 the temptation to marry for economic security or ease 
 (would be lessened. This temptation besets both 
 men and women, though not in the same degree, be- 
 cause men, through the economio .advantage en- 
 joyed by their sex, are oftener in a position of ease 
 than women are. It is the temptation, arising out of 
 man’s natural desire to gratify his needs with the 
 least possible exertion, to live by the means of others 
 rather than by one’s own labour. Its gratification 
 through marriage would not be rendered impossible 
 by the mere abolition of coercive laws governing the 
 marriage relation; but at least its cruder manifesta- 
 tions, such as the frequent attempts of unscrupulous 
 or demoralized women to use marriage for purposes 
 of extortion, would no longer assail the nostrils of 
 the public. Its reduction to a minimum must await 
 
Woman and Marriage 119 
 
 the establishment of an economic order under which 
 self-support will be easy and certain. 
 
 More general and binding, even, than the eco- 
 nomic obligations that marriage entails are the per- 
 sonal claims that it creates. In so far as these 
 claims are psychological — those of affection and 
 habit, or attachment to children — their regulation 
 and abrogation will always afford a problem which 
 must be solved by the two persons concerned. There 
 is at present a stronlg tendency to equalize the inci- 
 dence of the laws whereby the State defines these re- 
 lations and imposes them on married people. The 
 old assumption of feminine inferiority in sexual 
 rights is gradually yielding to a single standard for 
 both sexes. So, also, the requirement that the wife 
 shall in all matters subordinate her will and judg- 
 ment to the will and judgment of her husband, tends 
 to be modified by the new view of woman as a free 
 agent rather than a mere adjunct to man. Quali- 
 fications for marriage and grounds for divorce tend 
 to become the same for both sexes as the State is 
 forced to relinquish its right to regard as offences in 
 one sex actions which it does not recognize as of- 
 fences in the other. It would appear, indeed, that 
 
120 Concerning Women 
 
 the time is not far distant when the marriage-law, 
 however humiliating its provisions may be, will bear 
 equally on men and women. 
 
 But mere equalization of the law’s incidence leaves 
 untouched the previous question whether any third 
 person — and the State assumes the role of a third 
 person — has a legitimate right to define and regu- 
 late the personal relations of adult and presumably 
 mature people. So long as the basic assumption 
 goes unchallenged that the State may grant to man 
 and woman lifelong monoply-rights in one another, 
 or monopoly-rights which shall endure, despite the 
 inclination of the persons concerned, during the 
 State’s pleasure, so long will complaints of harsh or 
 unjust marriage or divorce laws prove the truth of 
 Mill’s dictum that “no enslaved class ever asked for 
 complete liberty at once . . . those who are under 
 any power of ancient origin, never begin by com- 
 plaining of the power itself, but only of its op- 
 pressive exercise.” Marriage under conditions ar- 
 bitrarily fixed by an external agency is slavery; 
 and if we allow the right of an external agency — be 
 it State, family, or community — to place marriage 
 in so degrading a position, we necessarily deny the 
 freedom of the individual in this most intimate of 
 
Woman and Marriage 121 
 
 relationships, and put ourselves in the position of 
 petitioners for privilege when we sue for an im- 
 provement in the rules to which we have subjected 
 ourselves. 
 
 When this fundamental fact is borne in mind, it 
 becomes at once apparent that marriage will gain in 
 dignity through the abolition of all legal sanction 
 upon the personal claims that it involves. In a 
 community which had renounced all claim to pre- 
 scribe legally the nature of the marriage-bond, its 
 duration, and the manner of its observance, there 
 would be no washing of soiled domestic linen in the 
 squalid publicity of courtrooms and newspaper- 
 columns; no arbitration of noisy domestic differences 
 by judges whose only qualification for the office is 
 that they have had enough political influence to get 
 themselves elected; none of the demoralizing con- 
 sequences that the sense of proprietorship in one an- 
 other has on the dispositions of married people. 
 Marriage might still be publicly registered ; it would 
 no longer be publicly regulated. 'Its regulation 
 would be left to the people whom it concerned, as 
 it properly should be and safely could be; for as 
 Mill remarked, “the modern conviction, the fruit of 
 a thousand years experience, is that things in which 
 
122 Concerning Women 
 
 the individual is the person directly interested, never 
 go right but as they are left to his own discretion, 
 and that any regulation of them by authority, save 
 to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischiev- 
 ous.” The only way to protect married people 
 against the bad faith which one may show toward 
 the other, is to leave the door wide open for either 
 of them to be quit of the union the minute it ceases 
 to be satisfactory. If society for any reason sees fit 
 to close the door to freedom, it sets union by law 
 above the union by affection on which alone true 
 marriage is based; and in so doing it is responsible 
 for an amount of injustice, spiritual conflict, and 
 suffering which no attempt at equitable regulation 
 can ever compensate. Such attempts are in reality 
 mere efforts to adjust the marriage-relation to the 
 fundamental injustice of the marriage-law. 
 
 Perhaps the most serious objection to the union by 
 law is that it is so often an effective barrier against 
 the union by affection; for the union by law com- 
 plicates marriage with a great many uses that are 
 not properly germane to it; such as the custom of 
 taking on one another’s family and friends, and the 
 setting up of a common menage where this most inti- 
 mate and delicate of relationships is maintained in 
 
Woman and Marriage 123 
 
 a trying semi-publicity under the critical and un- 
 wavering scrutiny of relatives and friends. The in- 
 fluence of the expected extends to the regulation of 
 the menage and the division of labour. A lover 
 would hardly, perhaps, require his mistress to darn 
 his socks; but if she became his wife he would prob- 
 ably yield to the immemorial expectation that a mar- 
 ried woman shall do her husband’s mending. So, 
 likewise, a woman may refuse to accept support 
 from her lover so long as he is only her lover, and 
 accept it as a matter of course when the union has 
 been legalized. All conventional uses have a purely 
 fortuitous and incidental connexion with marriage; 
 yet they often fret it into failure. As Jane Littell 
 remarked not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly, 
 “being friends with someone to whom the law binds 
 one is not so easy as it sounds.” This is especially 
 true where the law assumes a natural inferiority in 
 one party to the contract, as it almost universally 
 does. 
 
 I have not forgotten the children. One could 
 hardly do so in an age when sentimentalism offers 
 them as the final and unanswerable reason for con- 
 tinuing to tolerate the injustice involved in institu- 
 tionalized marriage. But the very fact that it is the 
 
124 Concerning Women 
 
 sentimentalist who thus defends established abuses 
 is in itself enough to warrant considerable wariness 
 in dealing with his arguments ; for when the defend- 
 ers of any cause have recourse to sentimentality, it 
 is likely to be for want of solid ground under their 
 feet, or in order to obscure a doubtful ulterior mo- 
 tive. Sentimentalism is a sugar coating on the pill 
 of things as they are, which makes it easier for many 
 people to swallow it than to contemplate a dose 
 which is at once more salutary and more formidable, 
 namely: things as they ought to be. When one 
 hears the sentimentalist proclaiming the sacredness 
 of marriage, one may agree with him; but at the 
 same time one must wonder what kind of marriage 
 he means; whether it is the ceremony performed by 
 a minister or a magistrate, or the union which two 
 people have made sacred through mutual respect, 
 confidence and love. Such marriages as this last 
 have sometimes been without benefit of clergy— 
 Would these be as sacred to the sentimentalist as the 
 marriage which has been sanctified only in law? 
 Again, when one listens to the good old saws about 
 the glory of motherhood, one may be interested to 
 know the conditions under which it is proposed to 
 call it glorious; and when domesticity is held up to 
 
Woman and Marriage 125 
 
 admiration as woman’s natural vocation, one won- 
 ders whether the sponsor of domesticity is willing 
 to put his argument to the test by leaving her free to 
 choose that vocation or not, as she will, or whether 
 his praise is a mere preface to the demand that she 
 be forced into this natural vocation by the method 
 of denying her an alternative. So, likewise, when 
 one hears the argument that marriage should be 
 indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot 
 help wondering whether the protagonist is really 
 such a firm friend of childhood, or whether his con- 
 cern for the welfare of children is merely so much 
 protective coloration for a constitutional and super- 
 stitious fear of change. 
 
 Children are really as helpless as women have al- 
 ways been held to be; and in their case the reason is 
 not merely supposition. Woman was supposed to 
 be undeveloped man. The child is undeveloped 
 man or woman; and because of its lack of develop- 
 ment it needs protection. To place it in the abso- 
 lute power of its parents as its natural protectors 
 and assume that its interests will invariably be well 
 guarded, would be as cruel as was the assumption 
 that a woman rendered legally and economically 
 helpless and delivered over to a husband or other 
 
126 Concerning Women 
 
 male guardian, was sure of humane treatment. No 
 human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be 
 entrusted to the power of another; for no human be- 
 ing may safely be trusted with absolute power. It 
 is fair, therefore, that in the case of those whose 
 physical or mental immaturity renders them com- 
 paratively helpless, there should be a watchful third 
 person who from the vantage-point of a disinterested 
 neutrality may detect and stop any infringement of 
 their rights by their guardians, be they parents or 
 other people. Here then, is a legitimate office for the 
 community: to arbitrate, in the interest of justice, 
 between children and their guardians. 
 
 But the community has a more direct and less dis- 
 interested concern in the welfare of children: every 
 child is a potential power for good or ill; what its 
 children become, that will the community become. 
 It is knowledge of this that prompts the establish- 
 ment of public schools and colleges, and all the 
 manifold associational activities intended to pro- 
 mote the physical and spiritual welfare of children. 
 It is back of the mothers’ pension system, which is 
 properly, as the Children’s Bureau insists, a system 
 of assistance for children. From all this activity it 
 is only a step to the assumption by the community 
 
Woman and Marriage 127 
 
 of entire responsibility for the upbringing and 
 education of every child. This idea has some ad- 
 vocates; it is a perfectly logical corollary of the 
 modern conception of the child’s relation to the com- 
 munity. Yet it invites a wary and conditional ac- 
 ceptance. It is fair that the community should 
 assume the burden of the child’s support and edu- 
 cation, particularly so long as the community sanc- 
 tions an economic system which makes this burden 
 too heavy for the great majority of parents, and a 
 political system which may force male children to 
 sacrifice their lives in war as soon as parents have 
 completed the task of bringing them up. But the 
 advisibility of accomplishing this purpose through 
 the substitution of institutionalized care for parental 
 care is more than a little doubtful ; for to institution- 
 alize means in great degree to mechanize. To es- 
 tablish such a system and make it obligatory, would 
 be to remove many children from the custody of 
 parents entirely unfitted to bring them up; but it 
 would likewise involve the removal of many chil- 
 dren from the custody of parents eminently well 
 fitted for such a responsibility. It would imply an 
 assumption that the people who might be engaged 
 to substitute for parents would be better qualified 
 
128 Concerning Women 
 
 for their task than the parents themselves; and such 
 an assumption would be dangerous so long as the 
 work of educators continues to be as little respected 
 and as poorly paid as it now is. Moreover, so 
 long as society remains organized in the exploiting 
 State, the opportunity to corrupt young minds and 
 turn out rubber-stamp patriots would be much 
 greater than that which is now afforded by the pub- 
 lic school system, whose influence intelligent parents 
 are sometimes able to neutralize. 
 
 Perhaps the best argument against such a system 
 is that it would not work. If experience teaches 
 anything, it is that what the community undertakes 
 to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to 
 the temptation to corruption that such enterprises 
 involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of per- 
 sonal interest on the part of those engaged in them. 
 Those people who advocate bringing up children in 
 institutions do not take into account the value of 
 parental interest in the child ; nor do they respect the 
 parental affection which would cause many parents 
 to suffer keenly if they were forced to part with their 
 children. The family is by no means always the 
 best milieu for young people; but before we seek to 
 substitute a dubious institutionalism, it would be 
 
Woman and Marriage 129 
 
 wise to ascertain whether the change is imperative. 
 In a matter which touches, as this one does, the most 
 profound human instincts, there is need to observe 
 Lord Falkland’s dictum that “where it is not neces- 
 sary to change, it is necessary not to change.” As 
 I have shown in the preceding chapter, parents are 
 at present under heavy economic handicaps in dis- 
 charging their parental duties, handicaps which not 
 only render those duties a heavy burden, but 
 lengthen inordinately the period for which they must 
 be undertaken. Until those handicaps are removed, 
 it will not be fair to say that the family is a failure; 
 and until they are removed, we may be certain that 
 any other institution charged with the care of the 
 young will be a failure, for it will be filled with peo- 
 ple who are there less because of their understand- 
 ing of children and their peculiar fitness to rear 
 them, than because such work offers an avenue of 
 escape from starvation. 
 
 These same considerations apply to the argument 
 that the rearing of children should be institutional- 
 ized in order to emancipate women from the im- 
 memorial burden of “woman’s work.” There is a 
 simpler way of dealing with this problem, a way 
 which eliminates an element that dooms to failure 
 
130 Concerning Women 
 
 any scheme of human affairs in which it is involved, 
 namely: the element of coercion. To contend that 
 all mothers should be forced to devote themselves ex- 
 clusively to the rearing of children, or that they 
 should be forcibly relieved of this responsibility, is 
 to ignore the right of the individual to free choice in 
 personal matters. There is no relation more inti- 
 mately personal than that of parents to the child 
 they have brought into the world ; and there is there- 
 fore no relationship in which the community should 
 be slower to interfere. This is a principle univer- 
 sally recognized: the community at present inter- 
 feres only when the interest of the child, or that of 
 the community in the child, is obviously suffering. 
 The emancipation of women by no means necessi- 
 tates the abandonment of this principle. It neces- 
 sitates nothing more than a guarantee to women of 
 free choice either to undertake themselves the actual 
 work of caring for their children, or to delegate that 
 work to others. There is nothing revolutionary 
 about this: well-to-do parents have always exer- 
 cised this choice. In mediaeval Europe people of 
 the upper classes regularly sent their children to be 
 brought up by other people, and took the children of 
 other people into their own houses. In Renaissance 
 
Woman and Marriage 131 
 
 Italy the wealthy urban dwellers, almost as soon as 
 their children were born, sent them out of the plague- 
 infested cities to nurse with peasants. In modern 
 times people who can afford it often place their 
 children in boarding schools at an early age, and 
 keep them at home only during vacations — when 
 they do not place them in camps. Under a system 
 of free economic opportunity all people, instead of 
 a few, would have this alternative to rearing their 
 children at home, for they would all be able to af- 
 ford it. Even under the present economic order 
 it would be possible if the system of children’s 
 assistance were extended to include every child, 
 whether the parents were living or not. But under 
 a system of free opportunity there would be greater 
 certainty that the child would not suffer through 
 separation from its parents; for the paid educator 
 would be in his position because it interested him. 
 If it did not, he would take advantage of the oppor- 
 tunity, freely open to him, to do something that did. 
 
 So long as responsibility for the care and support 
 of children continues to be vested in the parents, so 
 long, for the sake of the child, will it be the duty 
 of society to insist that parents shall not neglect this 
 responsibility. But when society had renounced 
 
132 Concerning Women 
 
 all claim to regulate the affairs of married people, 
 it would content itself with holding all parents, 
 married or unmarried, jointly liable for the support 
 and care of their children. If the parents were 
 married, then the apportioning of this burden be- 
 tween them would be arranged by mutual agree- 
 ment, and the community’s only interest in the con- 
 tract would be that of arbiter in case of a dispute 
 between the parties, precisely as in case of other 
 contracts. To assume that the community’s inter- 
 est in children justifies its claim to “preserve the 
 home” by making marriage indissoluble or dissolu- 
 ble only under humiliating conditions, is to confuse 
 issues. The practice of perpetuating marriage 
 merely for the sake of children defeats its own end ; 
 -for it is, far from being good for children, likely to 
 be injurious to them. It condemns them to be 
 brought up in what Mr. Shaw has well called a 
 little private hell. For the home, as other critics 
 than Mr. Shaw have pointed out, is a proper place 
 for children only when it provides harmonious con- 
 ditions for their development; and harmony is not 
 characteristic of homes where mutual love and confi- 
 dence no longer exist between the parents. The de- 
 mand that the freedom and happiness of parents 
 
Woman and Marriage 133 
 
 shall be sacrificed to the so-called interest of the 
 child is in reality a demand that injustice shall be 
 done one person for the sake of another; and where 
 this demand is effective it serves no end but that of 
 frustration and discord, as might be expected. It is 
 far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for 
 the community to content itself with insisting upon 
 the discharge of parental responsibility, without 
 prescribing too minutely the conditions under which 
 it shall be done. 
 
 It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the pres- 
 ervation of the home that makes people afraid of 
 divorce, as it is for other time-honoured concepts; 
 such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a 
 sacrament, that it is made in heaven and is there- 
 fore indissoluble in this world. Curiously enough, 
 this idea of the essential holiness and consequent in- 
 dissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in 
 Christian society with the most cold-blooded prac- 
 tice of marrying for convenience, for money, for 
 social prestige, for place and power, for everything 
 that ignores or negates the spiritual element in sex- 
 ual union. The marriage arranged for social or 
 mercenary reasons by the families of the contracting 
 parties, who might not even meet before the wedding- 
 
134 Concerning Women 
 
 day, was as sacred as if it had been founded upon 
 an intimate acquaintance and tender passion be- 
 tween them. Thus was utilitarianism invested with 
 a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a medi- 
 aeval court of love denied the possibility of roman- 
 tic attachment between husband and wife. The 
 Church, to be sure, introduced the principle of free 
 consent of the contracting parties ; but so long as the 
 subjection of women endured, there could be little 
 more than a perfunctory regard for this principle. 
 There can be no real freedom of consent when the 
 alternative to an unwelcome marriage is the cloister 
 or lifelong celibacy at the mercy of relatives whose 
 wishes and interests one has defied, in a society 
 where to be unmarried is, for a woman, to be nobody. 
 A son, because of the greater independence that his 
 sex gave him, might safely exercise some degree of 
 choice in marrying. A daughter might safely exer- 
 cise none. As women have become more independ- 
 ent, and their economic opportunities have increased, 
 consent has become more closely related to inclina- 
 tion, and in many places, notably the United States, 
 it is actually dependent upon inclination; 1 but 
 
 1 In countries where the custom of dowry persists the parents are 
 obviously in a position to exact a great degree of regard for their 
 
Woman and Marriage 135 
 
 while women remain at an economic disadvantage it 
 is hardly to be expected that the motives behind in- 
 clination and consent will always be entirely free 
 from an ignoble self-interest. 
 
 So long as woman’s economic and social welfare 
 was bound up with marriage, indissoluble marriage 
 undeniably offered her a certain kind of protection. 
 It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from 
 cruelty and infidelity on the part of her husband; 
 but it generally assured her of a living and a re- 
 spected position in society — that is, so long as she 
 violated none of the conventional taboos against her 
 sex. Even now the chivalrous man often feels that 
 he must endure an unhappy marriage rather than 
 cause his wife to incur the economic and social con- 
 sequences of divorce. He generally feels that her 
 chance of finding another husband to support her 
 would be considerably worse than his of getting an- 
 other wife to support; a feeling which, considering 
 the relative desirability of supporting and being 
 supported, will be justified so long as it is considered 
 
 wishes, more particularly where economic opportunity is no longer 
 plentiful. In this country, where abundance of free land made the 
 support of a family comparatively easy and secure, marriage early 
 became a matter to be arranged by the contracting parties. In 
 modern France, on the other hand, it is still largely a matter to be 
 arranged between families. 
 
136 Concerning Women 
 
 tolerable for women to be an economic dead weight 
 on the shoulders of men. 
 
 in 
 
 The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been 
 enforced on women only. The Christian Church, 
 after some indecision, finally decided that indis- 
 soluble monogamy was the only allowable form of 
 marriage; and in theory it exacted from man and 
 woman the same faithfulness to the marriage-vows. 
 Practically, of course, it did no such thing. Being 
 dominated by men, it eventually came to condone 
 the sexual irregularities of men, if it did not sanc- 
 tion them; but sexual irregularity in the subject 
 sex continued to be both theoretically and practically 
 intolerable. Woman became the repository of 
 morality in a society which regarded morality as 
 chiefly a matter of sex. But since she was at the 
 same time the means of satisfying those sexual needs 
 which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the 
 brunt of social displeasure at violation of the ascetic 
 creed. Womankind, as I have already remarked, 
 was divided into two classes: the virtuous wives and 
 cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals; 
 
Woman and Marriage 137 
 
 and those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their 
 bodies to gratify un-Christian desires. The pros- 
 titute, the “companion” of the Greeks, who had been 
 in the Greek world the only educated woman, the 
 only woman who enjoyed comparative freedom, be- 
 came in the Christian world a social outcast, reviled 
 and persecuted, a convenient scapegoat for man’s 
 sins of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her 
 misery for his failure to live up to the Christian 
 ideal of sexual purity. Nothing reflects more dis- 
 credit upon the dominance of the male under Chris- 
 tianity than the fact that he took advantage of the 
 economic helplessness which forced millions of 
 women to sell their sex for a living, and then perse- 
 cuted them outrageously because he had outrage- 
 ously mistreated them. For prostitution, however 
 much it may reflect upon the morality and, more 
 especially, upon the taste, of men, has nothing' 
 whatever to do with the morality of women. It is, 
 with women, a question of economics, purely and 
 simply. The man who buys gratification of his 
 sexual desire has at least an option in the matter; 
 he will not starve if he abstains ; but the woman who 
 sells her body indiscriminately to any man who will 
 buy, does so because her need to earn a living for 
 
138 Concerning Women 
 
 herself or her family forces her to do violence to her 
 natural selective sexual disposition. 
 
 This economic pressure has been strikingly illus- 
 trated in Central Europe since the war, where thou- 
 sands of women of gentle breeding have been liter- 
 ally driven to the streets by the compelling scourge 
 of want. The men upon whom these women in 
 normal times would have depended for a living had 
 been either killed or incapacitated in the war, or 
 their power to earn had disappeared in the economic 
 collapse which followed. When men, in a society 
 so organized as to give them an economic advantage 
 over women, can no longer earn enough to maintain 
 their dependents even at the subsistence-level, the 
 chance of women, for the most part untrained to 
 breadwinning, to do so will be poor indeed. Under 
 such circumstances the woman thrown on her own 
 resources may, through some extraordinary stroke 
 of luck, find a way to self-sufficiency through la- 
 bour; but more often she is obliged, after her posses- 
 sions have been disposed of, to take refuge from 
 starvation by selling the only marketable commodity 
 that is left her — her sex. Of course there is the al- 
 ternative of starvation, which for herself she may 
 choose; but if this choice would involve starvation 
 
Woman and Marriage 139 
 
 for her children or other dependents she is likelier to 
 choose prostitution, precisely as so many German 
 and Austrian mothers and daughters have done. 
 Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s little story of Vienna after 
 the war, “Viennese Medley,” depicts a situation 
 which is not untypical. A middle-class Viennese 
 family which had enjoyed a mediocre prosperity be- 
 fore the war, is suffering, with all that suffering city, 
 from the nightmare of want that followed a savage 
 peace. In the background, unspoken of, the only 
 ray of hope across the bleakness of their extremity, 
 moves the sister who sells her beauty to foreign offi- 
 cials and native, war-made millionaires. It is she 
 who, when the young half-brother is struck by the 
 dreaded plague of tuberculosis, sends him to the 
 mountains and health. It is she who helps the 
 sister-in-law to establish herself in trade, after the 
 brilliant young surgeon, her brother, has come back 
 a nervous ruin from the war. It is she who buries, 
 with decent ceremony, the child of a sister whose 
 husband, once a distinguished professor, is now 
 able to do little more than starve with his numerous 
 family. She even saves from want the young noble- 
 man whom she loves, and his family as well. Not 
 every woman who has sold herself in stricken Eu- 
 
140 Concerning Women 
 
 rope could command so high a price, but there is no 
 doubt that many of them stood between their suffer- 
 ing families and death. 
 
 War releases all that is brutal in man, and places 
 woman in a peculiarly helpless position; therefore 
 it is a prolific immediate source of prostitution. 
 But the ultimate and permanent source is the source 
 of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by 
 man. So long as society is organized to protect 
 the exploiter, so long will peace be an incessant 
 struggle — for more wealth with the privileged 
 classes; for existence with the exploited masses — 
 and war will be, as it has always been, merely a final 
 explosion of the struggling forces. So long as hu- 
 man beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so 
 long will woman be under temptation to sell the use 
 of her body. She may prostitute herself because 
 she has literally no other way to get a living; she 
 may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; 
 she may do so because prostitution seems to offer a 
 relief from hopeless drudgery; she may do so be- 
 cause she has made what the world calls a misstep 
 and is cut off thereby from respectability and the 
 chance to earn a decent living ; or she may prostitute 
 herself legally, in marriage, as women have been 
 
Woman and Marriage 141 
 
 forced to do from time immemorial. In every case 
 there is one motive force, and that motive force is 
 economic pressure, which bears hardest upon women 
 because of the social, educational, and economic dis- 
 advantages from which they are forced to suffer in a 
 world dominated by men. No amount of masculine 
 chivalry has ever mitigated this evil, and no amount 
 ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory, while pros- 
 titution is. No amount of exhortation, no amount 
 of devoted labour on the part of reformers will 
 touch it; for it is not a question of morality. 
 No amount of persecution — of arrests, of man- 
 handling, of night-courts, public insult, fine and 
 imprisonment — will check it, for the necessity 
 which prompts it is too imperious to be balked by 
 the uncomprehending guardians of public decency. 
 The peril of this necessity threatens all womankind; 
 one turn of fortune’s wheel may bring its stark 
 aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered of 
 women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who 
 are peculiarly in danger; those women whose prepar- 
 ation for the struggle to wrest a living from eco- 
 nomic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to 
 marry and support them. The parent who, in a 
 world where celibacy and prostitution are on the in- 
 
142 Concerning Women 
 
 crease, fails to give a girl child education or train- 
 ing which will enable her to get her living by her 
 own efforts, forces her to take a dangerous risk; for 
 the woman who is brought up in the expectation of 
 getting her living by her sex may ultimately be 
 driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a 
 husband, or, having found one, loses him. 
 
 There is only one remedy for prostitution, and 
 that remedy is economic freedom — freedom to labour 
 and to enjoy what one produces. When women 
 have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; 
 for no woman will get a living by doing violence to 
 her deep-rooted selective instinct when opportunities 
 are plentiful and a little labour will yield an ample 
 living. There may still be women who are sexually 
 promiscuous; but there is a vast gulf between pro- 
 miscuity and prostitution: the sexually promiscuous 
 woman may choose her men ; the prostitute may not. 
 It is the abysmal gulf between choice and necessity. 
 
 iv 
 
 Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so 
 closely related, as social problems, that it is im- 
 possible to draw firm lines of demarcation between 
 
Woman and Marriage 143 
 
 them. The unlegalized union — which is betrayed 
 by illegitimate birth — may be a marriage in all but 
 law; the legalized marriage may be merely a respec- 
 table form of prostitution; prostitution may take 
 the form of a more or less permanent union which 
 may even assume the dignity of a true marriage. 
 Illegitimacy, marriage, and prostitution do not exist 
 independently; they exist in relation to one another 
 and are often confused in people’s minds — as when 
 it is assumed that all mistresses are essentially har- 
 lots. They are the three faces of mankind’s disas- 
 trous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon 
 the unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a 
 triptych of which the central panel is institutional- 
 ized marriage and the other panels the two chief 
 aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately 
 be “The Martyrdom of Woman.” 
 
 Experience has amply proved that as individual- 
 ism progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to 
 impose upon people more than an appearance of 
 conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really 
 regulate anything so essentially personal and pri- 
 vate in its nature as the sexual relation: it can only 
 take revenge upon its natural result — and thereby 
 encourage the prevention of that result by artificial 
 
144 Concerning Women 
 
 means. For every unmarried mother who is perse- 
 cuted by society, there are ten unmarried women who 
 escape the social consequences of an unauthorized 
 sexual relation. For every faithful husband there 
 is another who deceives his wife with other women; 
 nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful 
 to their marriage vows. There are people who live 
 together in the sexual uncleanness of loveless mar- 
 riages ; and there are those who live purely in extra- 
 legal union. The sexual impulse is too variable 
 and too imperious to be compressed into a formula. 
 
 Christian society, as I have remarked, early sur- 
 rendered its uncompromising asceticism and settled 
 down to an easy acceptance of the mere appearance 
 of conventional sexual virtue — that is, so far as men 
 were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil be- 
 ings, who, incongruously enough, at the same time 
 embodied Christian morality, must naturally be 
 under the rigid surveillance of their male tutors, and 
 no deviation from established rules might be al- 
 lowed them. Thus worldly motives in marrying 
 might be united with sacramental monogamy; for 
 the man might avail himself of extra-marital union 
 as a safety-valve for the emotional needs to which 
 marriage gave no scope. The needs of the woman 
 
Woman and Marriage 145 
 
 were not considered, save when savage punishment 
 was visited upon their illicit satisfaction. Thus 
 hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly encouraged, and 
 the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless 
 generations lived a gigantic social lie which dis- 
 torted and perverted their spiritual vision as only an 
 accepted lie can distort and pervert it. 
 
 I do not mean by this that there have not been 
 millions of really monogamous marriages. To in- 
 timate that the greater sexual freedom allowed men 
 by law and custom has led all men into licence would 
 be as stupid as to assume that repression and sur- 
 veillance have kept all women chaste. But the in- 
 stitution of marriage, in Christian society, has 
 represented compromise, and the fruit of compro- 
 mise is insincerity — such insincerity, for example, 
 as the Government of South Carolina shows when 
 it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what proportion 
 of his estate a man may leave to his concubine. 
 
 Any people which wishes to attain dignity and 
 seriousness in its collective life must resolve to cast 
 aside compromise and insincerity, and to look at all 
 questions — even the vexed one of sex — squarely and 
 honestly. The person who would do this has first 
 some prepossessions to overcome: he must forget 
 
146 Concerning Women 
 
 tradition long enough to appraise institutionalized 
 marriage by its value to the human spirit; he must 
 resolve for the time to regard men and women as 
 equally human beings, entitled to be judged by the 
 same standards, and not by different sets of tradi- 
 tional criteria; and he must put away fear of sex 
 and fear of autonomy. If he can do these things, 
 he may be able to look clear-eyed down the long 
 vista of the centuries and realize the havoc that has 
 been wrought in the souls of men and women by a 
 sexual code and a system of marriage based on a 
 double standard of spiritual values and of conduct. 
 He may perceive how constant tutelage degrades the 
 human spirit, and how much greater would be the 
 sum of human joy if freedom were substituted for 
 coercion and regulation — if men and women were 
 without legal power to harass and bedevil one an- 
 other simply because the State, through the 
 marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights in 
 one another; if virginity and chastity were matters 
 of self-respect and taste, instead of being matters 
 of worldly self-interest to women and unconcern to 
 men; if the relations between the sexes were based 
 on equality and regulated only by affection and the 
 desire to serve and give happiness. 
 
Woman and Marriage 147 
 
 The modification which institutionalized mar- 
 riage has been undergoing since the partial emer- 
 gence of woman, its chief victim, have been in the 
 direction of equality and freedom. The relative 
 ease with which divorce may now be had marks a 
 long step towards recognition of marriage as a per- 
 sonal rather than a social concern; and so does the 
 tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting 
 from the marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better 
 for the elevation of marriage to a higher plane than 
 the growing economic independence of women and 
 the consequent improvement in the social position of 
 the unmarried woman; for only when marriage is 
 placed above all considerations of economic or so- 
 cial advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the high- 
 est demands of the human spirit. 
 
 But the emergence of women has had another sig- 
 nificant effect, namely: an increase in frankness 
 concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if not in 
 their number. Of late there has been much public 
 discussion of the wantonness of our modern youth; 
 which, being interpreted, means the disposition of 
 our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence in 
 pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been 
 countenanced in boys. This tendency is an entirely 
 
148 Concerning Women 
 
 natural result of woman’s increased freedom. The 
 conditions of economic and social life have under- 
 gone revolutionary change in the past half-century; 
 and codes of morals always yield before economic 
 and social exigency, for this is imperious. It is for 
 this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely 
 observed, that women of the lower classes have al- 
 ways enjoyed a certain immunity from the taboos 
 that reduced women of the middle and upper classes 
 to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. 
 Royden, “these ‘protections’ have been dispensed 
 with, it has not been because the poor have thought 
 either better or worse of their women, but merely 
 because they are too poor to dispense with, their 
 labour, and labour demands some small degree of 
 freedom.” Labour not only demands, it gives free- 
 dom. The woman who is economically independent 
 need no longer observe rules based on male domi- 
 nance; hence the new candour in woman’s attitude 
 towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex. 
 
 If there is about this attitude an element of bra- 
 vado, akin to that of the youth who thinks it clever 
 and smart to carry a hip-pocket flask, it bears testi- 
 mony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the 
 bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst 
 
Woman and Marriage 149 
 
 effect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and 
 therefore people suddenly released from it are al- 
 most bound to make fools of themselves. The 
 women who are emerging from it, if they have not 
 learned to substitute an enlightened self-interest for 
 the morality of repression, are certainly in danger 
 of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, 
 simply to demonstrate to themselves their emancipa- 
 tion from unjust conventions. There is no reason to 
 expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will 
 be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. 
 It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before 
 one may walk in it sure-footedly. “Everything,” 
 says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increas- 
 ing our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so- 
 called wantonness, this silly bravado, simply shows 
 that the new freedom is a step ahead of the self- 
 discipline that will eventually take the place of sur- 
 veillance and repression. It would not be so, per- 
 haps, if girls and boys had ever been enlightened 
 concerning the real sins of sex, and their true conse- 
 quences. Women, in the past, have been taught 
 to keep virgin or chaste for the sake of their 
 reputations, of their families, of their chances in the 
 marriage-market; they have been scared into chas- 
 
150 Concerning Women 
 
 tity in the name of religion ; but they have not been 
 taught to be chaste for the sake of the spiritual 
 value of chastity to themselves. Men, having been 
 expected to “sow their wild oats, have been taught 
 to sow them with a certain degree of circumspection. 
 Girls have been intimidated by pictures of the social 
 consequences of a misstep ; boys have been warned of 
 the physical danger involved in promiscuous sex- 
 ual relations. This may not have been the invari- 
 able preparation of youth for the experiences of 
 sex; but it has unquestionably been the usual one, 
 and it is one of utter levity and indecency. 
 
 The real sins of sex are identical for men and 
 women ; and they differ from infractions of the con- 
 ventional moral code in this respect among others: 
 that they do not have to be found out in order to be 
 punished. They carry their punishment in them- 
 selves, and that punishment is their deteriorative 
 effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions 
 of spiritual law; and there is this significant dis- 
 tinction to be observed between spiritual laws and 
 the laws of men: that regulation plays no part in 
 their administration. The law of freedom is the 
 law of God, who does not attempt to regulate the hu- 
 man soul, but sets instinct there as a guide and 
 
Woman and Marriage 151 
 
 leaves man free to choose whether he will follow 
 the instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual 
 law, or the desire which urges disregard of it. The 
 extreme sophistication of the conventional attitude 
 towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for 
 countless generations, with the inevitable result of 
 much unnecessary suffering and irreparable spirit- 
 ual loss. 
 
 A healthy instinct warns against lightness in 
 sexual relationships; and with reason, for the im- 
 pulse of sex is one of the strongest motive forces in 
 human development and human action. It touches 
 the obscurest depths of the soul ; it affects profoundly 
 the functions of the mind and the imagination — 
 can not, indeed, be dissociated from them. The 
 fact that it is also strongly physical leads to mis- 
 understanding and disregard of its relation to the 
 mind and spirit; a misunderstanding and disregard 
 which are immensely aggravated in a society where 
 woman, because of her inferior position, may be 
 used for the gratification of physical desire, with no 
 consideration of her own desires or her spiritual 
 claims. Prostitution, for example, has exerted a 
 most deleterious influence on the attitude of men 
 toward sex and toward women. But degradation 
 
152 Concerning Women 
 
 of the sex-impulse is inevitably punished. The 
 sheerly physical indulgence to which it leads pro- 
 duces a coarsening of spiritual fibre, an incapacity 
 for appreciation of spiritual values. Moreover, it 
 produces a cleavage between passion and affection 
 which renders impossible the highest and most beau- 
 tiful form of the sexual relation, the relation in 
 which passion and affection are fused in a love 
 which offers complete understanding and fulfilment. 
 It is to this fusion (and not to monogamy, which, 
 Spencer thought, developed love) that we owe “the 
 many and keen pleasures derived from music, poe- 
 try, fiction, the drama, etc., all of them having for 
 their predominant theme the passion of love.” True 
 monogamy, the product of this highest love, is not a 
 regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to be at- 
 tained, and it will not be attained by the person who 
 fails to recognize and to respect the spiritual aspects 
 of the sexual relation. 
 
 Nor will it be attained by the person who mis- 
 takes excitement for love, and who flits from one 
 temporary attachment to another, thinking always 
 to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous 
 philandering not only precludes depth of affection 
 and thus renders constancy impossible ; it also blunts 
 
Woman and Marriage 153 
 
 perception. Its effect was never better expressed 
 than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims. 
 
 I waive the quantum o’ the sin, 
 
 The hazard of concealin’, 
 
 But och! it hardens a’ within, 
 
 And petrifies the feelin’. 
 
 This is the penalty of levity in human relations: 
 that it petrifies feeling. One pays the price in 
 spiritual deterioration. There is probably no more 
 striking testimony to this than the first part of 
 Goethe’s “Faust.” Consider what we know of the 
 nature of Goethe’s relations with women; and then 
 consider the spiritual insensitivity, the failure to 
 perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual 
 treasures that life holds in store, that are implied 
 in his failure to devise for Faust, brought back from 
 the brink of the grave at cost of his immortal soul, 
 any more animating employment for his new-found 
 youth than a low intrigue with an ignorant peasant 
 girl. 
 
 I will pass by the contention that men are by na- 
 ture polygamous and women monogamous; for it 
 rests on evidence created by a dual standard of con- 
 duct for the sexes. Certain women of independent 
 
154 Concerning Women 
 
 spirit are at present rather conspicuously engaged in 
 proving themselves not merely polygamous but 
 promiscuous; and a great many men have always 
 proved themselves to be monogamous. Probably 
 human beings vary in respect of these tendencies 
 as of others. All people, perhaps, can not attain the 
 highest plane in love, either for want of capacity or 
 of opportunity; nor can all people conform to a 
 single mode of conduct. But all people can attain 
 sincerity in sexual relations, and at least a certain 
 degree of self-knowledge. Sincerity, self-knowl- 
 edge, respect for oneself and for other people; these 
 are essential to a genuine ethic of sex; and they are 
 uncontemplated by the sanctions of conventional 
 morality. Yet the person who violates this ethic 
 sins against his own spirit, which is to sin against 
 the Holy Ghost, and on the spiritual plane he will 
 be punished. 
 
 An increase in extra-legal relationships does not 
 of itself imply spiritual retrogression. It might 
 imply instead one of two things, or both, namely: 
 an increase in the economic obstacles to legal mar- 
 riage; or a growing disinclination to admit an affair 
 so personal as the sex-relation to sanction and regu- 
 lation by people whom it did not concern. If men 
 
Woman and Marriage 155 
 
 and women were economically equal and indepen- 
 dent, the number of marriages might increase 
 enormously; on the other hand, institutionalized 
 marriage might be superseded by marriage without 
 legal sanction, which before the birth of children 
 might not be even known or recognized as marriage . 1 
 Free people would probably want less of official 
 interference in their personal affairs, rather than 
 more. But for those who wanted to avoid the 
 terrors of autonomy there would still be marriage; 
 and for those who wanted to walk in the strait and 
 ennobling way of freedom, there would be the right 
 to love without official permission, and to bring 
 forth children unashamed. Those who wished to 
 sell themselves would be free to do so if they could 
 find buyers ; but no one would be forced to live by vi- 
 olating the law of love which is the law of life. 
 Freedom implies the right to live badly, but it also 
 implies the right to live nobly and beautifully; and 
 for one who has faith in the essential goodness of 
 the human spirit, in the natural aspiration towards 
 
 1 Several feminists have already, indeed, urged public sanction 
 of extra-legal sexual relations, and C. Gasquoine Hartley, with a 
 genuinely Teutonic passion for order, has even advocated their regu- 
 lation by the State. This is probably impossible, for people who 
 choose such relationships usually do so to escape regulation. 
 
156 Concerning Women 
 
 perfection which flowers with touching beauty even 
 in the bleak soil of that hardship, degradation and 
 crime to which injustice condemns the mass of hu- 
 manity — for one who has this faith in the human 
 spirit, there can be no question what its ultimate 
 choice would be. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN 
 I 
 
 It is to the industrial revolution more than any- 
 thing else, perhaps, that women owe such freedom 
 as they now enjoy; yet if proof were wanting of 
 the distance they have still to cover in order to at- 
 tain, not freedom, but mere equality with men, their 
 position in the industrial world would amply supply 
 it. Men in industry suffer from injustices and 
 hardships due to the overcrowding of the labour- 
 market. Women suffer from these same injustices 
 and hardships; and they have an additional handi- 
 cap in their sex. The world of work, embracing 
 industry, business, the professions, is primarily a 
 man’s world. Women are admitted, but not yet on 
 an equal footing. Their opportunities for employ- 
 ment are restricted, sometimes by law, but more 
 often by lack of training; and their remuneration 
 as wage-earners and salaried workers is generally 
 less than that of men. They have to contend with 
 traditional notions of what occupations are fitting 
 
158 Concerning Women 
 
 for their sex; with the jealousy of male workers; 
 with the prejudices of employers; and finally with 
 their own inertia and their own addiction to tradi- 
 tional concepts. All these difficulties are immensely 
 aggravated by the keenness of the competition for 
 work. If the opportunity to work were, as it should 
 be, an unimpeded right instead of a privilege doled 
 out by an employer, these handicaps of women would 
 be easily overridden by the demand for their la- 
 bour. I shall discuss this point more fully later 
 on. It is sufficient here to note that when the war 
 created a temporary shortage of labour, women were 
 not only employed in, but were urged in the name 
 of patriotism to enter, occupations in which until 
 then only men had been employed. The effect of 
 this temporary shortage on their industrial oppor- 
 tunities affords a hint of what their position would 
 be if the glutting of the labour-market were per- 
 manently relieved. A shortage of labour means 
 opportunity for the worker, male or female. 
 
 Women have always been industrial workers. 
 Otis T. Mason even went so far as to declare that 
 “All the peaceful arts of today were once woman’s 
 peculiar province. Along the lines of industrialism 
 she was pioneer, inventor, author, originator.” 
 
Economic Position of Women 159 
 
 This view is in rather striking contrast with the 
 contemptuous derogation which has been for a long 
 time current in European civilization, and has 
 found expression in such cutting remarks as that 
 of Proudhon, that woman “could not even invent 
 her own distaff.” It is no doubt a fairer view, al- 
 though it is probably somewhat exaggerated. 
 There is certainly no valid reason to suppose that 
 sex is a barrier to the invention and improvement 
 of industrial processes. Be this as it may, it is un- 
 deniable that women have always been producers. 
 Among some primitive tribes, indeed, they are the 
 only industrialists, the men occupying themselves 
 with war and the chase or, among maritime peo- 
 ples, with fishing. The modern invasion of the in- 
 dustrial field by women does not, then, represent an 
 attempt to do something that women have never done 
 before. It does represent an attempt to adapt them- 
 selves to the new conditions created by the industrial 
 revolution. 
 
 The range of their opportunities has been con- 
 siderably restricted by prejudices arising from the 
 traditional sexual division of labour in European 
 society. “In the developed barbarism of Europe, 
 only a few simple household industries were on the 
 
160 Concerning Women 
 
 whole left to women.” 1 It was natural, then, when 
 women followed industry into the larger field of 
 machine-production, that it should be assumed that 
 the industries in which they might fittingly engage 
 would be those most nearly akin to the occupations 
 which European society has regarded as peculiarly 
 feminine. Before the World War, according to 
 the Women’s Bureau, “over seventy-five per cent of 
 all women engaged in manufacture were concen- 
 trated in the textile and garment-making indus- 
 tries”; and we have the same authority for the state- 
 ment that “except for certain branches of food- 
 manufacture — such as flour making . . . women 
 constitute from a third to two-thirds of the working 
 forces in the industries concerned with the busi- 
 ness of clothing and feeding both the fighting and 
 the civilian population.” The new opportunities 
 opened up by the exigency of the war-period widened 
 considerably the scope of women’s activity; they 
 were employed in machine-shops and tool-rooms, in 
 steel- and rolling-mills, in instrument-factories, in 
 factories manufacturing sewing machines and type- 
 writers, in utensil-factories, in plants working in 
 rubber and leather, in wood- working industries. 
 
 1 Ellis: Man and Woman. 5th ed. p. 14. 
 
Economic Position of Women 161 
 
 In some of these industries women continue to 
 be employed. In others they were discharged to 
 make room for men when the emergency was over. 
 But even where they continue to be employed their 
 opportunities for training are not equal to those of 
 men. The Women’s Bureau in 1922 issued a val- 
 uable bulletin on “Industrial Opportunities and 
 Training for Women and Girls.” According to 
 this bulletin, the war-experience of women in new 
 employments made it apparent that the most prom- 
 ising future for craftswomen in these fields lies in 
 (a) machine-shops where light parts are made, (b) 
 wood-product factories where assembling and finish- 
 ing are important processes, (c) optical- and instru- 
 ment-factories, (d) sheet-metal shops. The survey 
 made by the Bureau to discover how many of the 
 country’s industrial training schools were fitting 
 women for these trades disclosed the fact that in 
 nine States where women, because of industrial con- 
 ditions, are most in need of training for machine- 
 shop, sheet-metal, furniture, or optical work, they 
 are either excluded by public vocational schools 
 from the courses in such works, or they are not 
 encouraged, as men are, to enter those courses. In 
 Ohio, for example, women were enrolled in only 
 
162 Concerning Women 
 
 five of the fifty-three public vocational schools re- 
 porting, and in these five schools they were taught 
 dressmaking, costume-design, dress-pattern making, 
 embroidery, power-machine sewing, and pottery 
 making. Men on the other hand, received instruc- 
 tion in the following courses which women needed: 
 machine-shop practice, tool-making, shop mathe- 
 matics, mechanical drafting, blue-print reading, 
 metallurgy, pattern-making, sheet-metal work, weld- 
 ing, auto-mechanics and repair, motor-cycle me- 
 chanics, gas engineering, cabinet-making and wood- 
 working. Women were not debarred by rule or 
 law from entering these courses, but they were not 
 encouraged to do so. The courses, as one superin- 
 tendent wrote, were “designed for men.” The sit- 
 uation in Ohio is more or less the same as that in 
 the other eight States. Women are either not ad- 
 mitted to vocational courses designed to prepare 
 workers for the industries cited, or they are not en- 
 couraged to enroll. Yet, as the Bureau points out, 
 these institutions are operated at the expense of the 
 taxpayers, women as well as men, and their equip- 
 ment should be used to serve women as well as men. 
 “It is obvious,” says the Bureau, “that the public 
 vocational school authorities, with few exceptions, 
 
Economic Position of Women 163 
 
 think of trade for women only in terms of dress- 
 making and millinery, and are as yet quite oblivious 
 to the fact that these trades, except in certain cloth- 
 ing centers, are not the big employers of woman 
 labour, nor are they always the best trades at which 
 to earn a livelihood. It is the semi-public school 
 that is beginning first to recognize the new position 
 which woman occupies in industry as a result of the 
 war and is opening to her its doors and guiding her 
 into courses leading to efficiency in the new occupa- 
 tions.” 
 
 This blindness of the school authorities to the 
 vocational needs of women goes to prove how strong 
 is the force of traditional prejudices. The making 
 of clothing has been largely in the hands of women 
 for so long that even in cities where the only indus- 
 tries employing women are mechanical or wood- 
 working, the public schools offer them courses in 
 sewing and millinery. Prepossession does not yield 
 all at once to established fact. If women can make 
 a permanent place for themselves in their new oc- 
 cupations, public officials will eventually come to 
 associate them with these occupations and follow 
 the lead of the semi-public schools in fitting girls 
 to engage in them on an equal footing with boys. 
 
164 Concerning Women 
 
 But it will take time; and meanwhile women will 
 continue to be at a disadvantage in entering these 
 occupations. So will they be at a disadvantage in 
 entering any occupation where they have not before 
 been employed, or where they are employed only in 
 insignificant numbers, so long as prejudice or con- 
 servatism continues to debar them, and the neces- 
 sary training is not as freely available to them as it 
 is to men. 
 
 Above all, so long as their industrial status con- 
 tinues to be, as the Women’s Bureau expresses it, 
 “subsidiary to their home status,” they can never 
 be on a really secure footing in the industrial world. 
 While employers assume that all male workers have 
 families to support and that all female workers are 
 in industry rather through choice than necessity and 
 may, in periods when work is slack, fall back on 
 the support of male relatives, so long will women 
 be the first workers to suffer from any slowing down 
 of industry. This was strikingly illustrated dur- 
 ing the period of unemployment which succeeded 
 the intense industrial activity made necessary by the 
 war, when women were discharged in great numbers 
 .to make room for men, and much resentment was 
 voiced against their retention in places which might 
 
Economic Position of Women 165 
 
 be filled by men. “Back to the home,” says the 
 Women’s Bureau, “was a slogan all too easily and 
 indiscriminately flung at the wage-earning woman 
 by those who had little conception of the causes 
 which forced her into wage-earning pursuits.” In 
 periods of industrial depression it appears to be the 
 regular practice to lay off the married women 
 workers first, then the single women, and the men 
 last. 
 
 How unjust to the woman worker, and how little 
 justified by actual facts, is this survival of the idea 
 that woman’s place is the home, has been shown 
 through investigations undertaken by the Women’s 
 Bureau and other agencies. The results of these 
 investigations, published in Bulletin No. 30 of the 
 Women’s Bureau, show that the woman in industry 
 is not merely working for pin-money, as thought- 
 less people assume, but that she is more often not 
 only supporting herself on her inadequate wage, 
 but contributing materially to the support of de- 
 pendents. “Contributing all earnings to the family 
 fund,” says the Bureau, “is a very general practice 
 among wage-earning women.” This of course 
 means, as the Bureau remarks, that however much 
 or little her contribution may mean to the family, 
 
1 66 Concerning Women 
 
 for the woman herself it means a surrender of eco- 
 nomic independence. The contrast between single 
 men and single women in this respect is significant. 
 In an investigation conducted among workers in 
 the shoe-making industry of Manchester, New 
 Hampshire, the Bureau found that “comparing 
 single men and women, the women contributed (to 
 the family income) more extensively, both actually 
 and relatively.” The percentage of earnings con- 
 tributed by sons and daughters is particularly in- 
 teresting. The Bureau found that “in the fami- 
 lies with per capita earnings of less than $500, 49.3 
 per cent of the sons and 71.6 per cent of the daugh- 
 ters contributed all their earnings, while in families 
 with per capita earninigs of $500 or more, 36.8 per 
 cent of the sons and 53.4 per cent of the daughters 
 contributed all earnings.” When one remembers 
 that the wage paid to women was so much lower 
 than that paid to men that the Bureau pronounced 
 them to be scarcely comparable, the fact that “the 
 daughters contributed a somewhat larger propor- 
 tion of the family earnings than did the sons” takes 
 on added significance. The sons contributed al- 
 most as much in actual money as the daughters, 
 but out of their higher wages they retained some- 
 
Economic Position of Women 167 
 
 thing for themselves, “thus assuring themselves of a 
 degree of independence and an opportunity to strike 
 out for themselves which is denied the daughters.” 
 
 It is evident, then, that women, even in the “eman- 
 cipation” of the industrial world, are continuing 
 their immemorial self-sacrifice to the family, and 
 that it is not the married woman alone, but the 
 single woman as well, who makes this sacrifice. 
 The conditions of the sacrifice have changed with the 
 changes in industry, but the sacrifice continues. 
 The productive labour of women appears to be quite 
 as indispensable to their families as it was in the 
 days when they spun and wove and sewed and baked 
 at home. This being the case, there is obviously 
 no other ground than prejudice for the assumption 
 that men, as the natural providers, should have 
 preference in the labour-market. According to the 
 census of 1920, thirty-five per cent of the men in 
 'the country are single; therefore it is fair to assume 
 that thirty-five per cent of the men in industry are 
 single. Two-thirds of the women in industry are 
 single, but the available figures show that a much 
 larger percentage of these women than of single men 
 are contributing all or most of their earnings to their 
 families, while married women workers are con- 
 
168 Concerning Women 
 
 tributing all of their earnings. In view of these 
 figures, there is patent injustice in the assumption 
 that all men and no women have dependents to 
 support. 
 
 So is there injustice in the assumption that women 
 are naturally at least partly dependent on male 
 workers, and therefore may fairly be forced to accept 
 a smaller wage than men. This assumption is not 
 only grossly unfair to the woman worker, but it 
 does not tally with fact. A fine example of the kind 
 of defence for the practice of sweating women 
 workers that can be based on this assumption is 
 quoted by the Women’s Bureau from an unnamed 
 commercial magazine. “Eighty-six per cent of 
 women workers,” runs this masterpiece of sophistry, 
 “live at home or with relatives. [So, in all likeli- 
 hood, do eighty-six per cent of male workers.] It 
 is immaterial in these cases whether the earnings of 
 each measure up to the cost of living scheduled for 
 a single woman living alone, so that the theory of 
 the need of a sufficient wage to support a single 
 woman living alone does not apply to eighty-six per 
 cent of the entire population [sic]” This quota- 
 tion, says the Bureau, is typical of the attitude of the 
 employer who pays his women employees less than a 
 
Economic Position of Women 169 
 
 living wage on the plea that they live at home and 
 therefore have few expenses. It is equally remark- 
 able in its ruthless disregard of the just claim 
 of the woman worker to the same share in the 
 product of her toil that the male worker is al- 
 lowed; and in its disregard of the fact that so long 
 as eighty-six per cent of women workers are forced 
 to accept a starvation-wage because they live at 
 home, the other fourteen per cent who do not live at 
 home will be forced by the pressure of competition 
 to accept the same starvation-wage. The question 
 how this fourteen per cent will eke out a living — 
 whether through overwork, begging or prostitution — 
 does not of course concern the employer ; for it is one 
 of the striking differences between chattel-slavery 
 and wage-slavery that the owner of the wage-slave 
 is under no obligation to keep his workers from 
 starving. That is, presumably, their own lookout. 
 
 If employers are not given to concerning them- 
 selves with this question, however, communities are. 
 Thirteen States have enacted laws fixing a mini- 
 mum wage for women, three have fixed minimum 
 wages in specified occupations, one has fixed a mini- 
 mum wage which its industrial welfare commission 
 has power to change, and nine have created boards 
 
170 Concerning Women 
 
 or commissions with power to fix minimum wage- 
 rates. It may be noted that in those States where 
 the rate is fixed by law, it has not responded to the 
 rising cost of living. In Utah and Arkansas, for 
 example, the minimum wage for an experienced 
 woman is $7.50 a week. There is constant effort 
 by interested individuals and organizations to get 
 similar laws enacted in other States, in spite of the 
 fact that in 1923 the Supreme Court of the United 
 States declared unconstitutional the minimum wage- 
 law of the District of Columbia. Such efforts, of 
 course, are in reality efforts to secure class-legisla- 
 tion, as are all attempts to secure special enact- 
 ments designed to benefit or protect women. 
 
 Of such enactments there is an ever increasing 
 number. So rapidly do they increase, indeed, that 
 women may be said to be in a fair way to exchange 
 the tyranny of men for that of organized uplift. 
 They are sponsored by those well-meaning indi- 
 viduals who deplore social injustice enough to yearn 
 to mitigate its evil results, but do not understand it 
 well enough to attack its causes; by women’s or- 
 ganizations whose intelligence is hardly commen- 
 surate with their zeal to uplift their sex; and by 
 men’s labour-organizations which are quite frankly 
 
Economic Position of Women 171 
 
 4 ' 
 
 in favour of any legislation that will lessen the 
 chances of women to compete with men in the 
 labour-market . 1 Given the combined suasion of 
 these forces, and Jhe inveterate sentimentalism 
 which makes it hard for legislators to resist any 
 plea on behalf of “the women' and children,” al- 
 most anything in the way of rash and ill-considered 
 legislation is possible, and even probable. There 
 is on the statute-books of the various States an 
 imposing array of laws designed to “protect” 
 women workers. There are only four States which 
 do not in some way limit the hours of work for 
 women; there are eleven which limit the number of 
 successive days that they may work; fourteen have 
 fixed the amount of time that shall be allowed them 
 
 1 Katharine Anthony found the workmen of Germany frankly in 
 favour of any “protective” legislation that would hamper German 
 working women (“Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia”) ; and 
 the Woman’s Party has met with the same attitude among unions 
 in this country. Among the resolutions passed at the twenty-fifth 
 convention of the International Moulders’ Union of North America 
 was the following : “Resolved, that the decision of this convention 
 be the restriction of the further employment of child and woman 
 labour in union core rooms and foundries, and eventually the elimi- 
 nation of such labour in all foundries by the example set by union 
 foundries in the uplifting of humanity. . . . Resolved, that the in- 
 coming officers be directed to, either by themselvs or in co-operation 
 with others in the labour movement, give their best thought and 
 effort in opposing the employment of female and child labour in 
 jobs recognized as men’s employment. 
 
172 Concerning Women 
 
 for their midday meal; twelve have ruled that a 
 woman may work only a given number of hours 
 without a rest-period. Sixteen States prohibit 
 night-work in certain industries or occupations ; two 
 limit her hours of night-work to eight. There is 
 also a tendency to extend to women special protec- 
 tion against the hazards of industry. In seventeen 
 States the employment of women in mines is pro- 
 hibited. Two States prohibit their employment in 
 any industry using abrasives. In four States they 
 are not allowed to oil moving machinery. Three 
 regulate their employment in core-making ; and four 
 regulate the amount of the weight that they may be 
 required to lift — the maximum ranging, oddly 
 enough, from fifteen pounds in Ohio and Penn- 
 sylvania to seventy-four pounds in Massachusetts. 
 In addition to those regulations which prohibit 
 women from working in certain occupations or un- 
 der certain conditions, “each State,” says the 
 Women’s Bureau, “has many laws and rulings 
 which prescribe the conditions under which women 
 should work, covering such matters as the lifting 
 of weights, provision of seats, and proper provision 
 for sanitation and comfort.” In six States, indus- 
 trial commissions have power to make regulations 
 
Economic Position of Women 173 
 
 for the health and welfare of workers. In three, 
 the commissions have power to make regulations for 
 women and minors only, and in one, for women, 
 minors, learners, and apprentices. 
 
 Perhaps the most striking thing about all these 
 multiform regulations governing the employment of 
 women is the amount of misplaced zeal that they 
 denote. “In most cases,” says the Women’s Bu- 
 reau, “the laws which prohibit their employment 
 have little bearing on the real hazards to which they 
 are exposed. . . . Prohibiting the employment of 
 women on certain dusty processes does not solve the 
 problem of any industrial disease in a community. 
 Men are also liable to contract pulmonary diseases 
 from exposure to dusts. ... It is very possible 
 that under the guise of ‘protection’ women may be 
 shut out from occupations which are really less 
 harmful to them than much of the tedious, heavy 
 work both in the home and in the factory which has 
 long been considered their special province. Safe 
 standards of work for women must come to be safe 
 standards for men also if women are to have an 
 equal chance in industry” The italics are mine. 
 It is worth mentioning here that only two States 
 prohibit the employment of women in the lead- 
 
174 Concerning Women 
 
 industry, which so far is the only one that has been 
 proved more harmful to women than to men. The 
 mass of legislation and regulation designed to pro- 
 tect women from the fatigues and hazards of in- 
 dustry would seem, then, to have been animated more 
 by chivalry than by scientific knowledge; and while 
 chivalry may be all very well in its place, it can 
 hardly be expected to solve the industrial problem 
 of women. 
 
 In con nexion with so-called welfare-legislation, 
 it is interesting to observe that women and children 
 are customarily grouped together as classes requir- 
 ing protection; and that various laws affecting their 
 position in industry have been sanctioned by the 
 courts as being for the good of the race and there- 
 fore not to be regarded as class-legislation. I Such 
 decisions certainly would appear to be reasonable in 
 so far as they apply to children, who are the rising 
 generation of men and women, and should be pro- 
 tected during their immaturity. But they can be 
 held valid as they affect women only if woman is 
 regarded as primarily a reproductive function. 
 This view, apparently, is held by most legislators, 
 courts, and uplifters ; and they have an unquestion- 
 able right to hold it. Whether, however, they are 
 
Economic Position of Women 175 
 
 just in attempting to add to the burdens of the work- 
 ing woman by imposing it upon her in the form of 
 rules that restrict her opportunities, is another ques- 
 tion. One thing is certain: if discriminative laws 
 and customs are to continue to restrict the oppor- 
 tunities of women and hamper them in their under- 
 takings, it makes little difference for whose benefit 
 those laws and customs are supposed to operate, 
 whether for the benefit of men, of the home, of the 
 race, or of women themselves; their effect on the 
 mind of woman and her opportunities, will be the 
 same. While society discriminates against her sex, 
 for whatever reason, she can not be free as an in- 
 dividual 
 
 Should nothing, then, be done to protect women 
 from the disabilities and hazards to which they are 
 subject in the industrial world? Better nothing, 
 perhaps, than protection which creates new disabili- 
 ties. Laws which fix fewer hours of work for 
 women than for men may result in shortening men’s 
 hours also in factories where many women are em- 
 ployed; but they may result in the substitution of 
 men — or children — for women in factories where 
 but few have been employed. Laws prohibiting 
 night-work may reduce the chances of women to get 
 
176 Concerning Women 
 
 much-needed employment, and may sometimes shut 
 them out of work which would offer higher returns 
 on their labour than anything they might get to do 
 during the day — as, for example, night-work in 
 restaurants, where the generous tips of after-theatre 
 patrons add considerably to the earnings of waiters. 
 Moreover, it is hard to see on what ground night- 
 work could be held to be more harmful for women 
 than for men. Minimum-wage laws may fix a legal 
 l imit_ to the greed of empl oyers, but they can not 
 prevent the unde rpayment of women workers, for 
 [they are based on theoretical notions of a living 
 wage, and have no relation to the actual value of 
 the individual’s labour. Where they are fixed by 
 law, as I have remarked, a rise in the cost of living 
 may render them ineffectual. As for those laws 
 which undertake to protect women against the 
 hazards of industry, they have usually, as the 
 Women’s Bureau has shown, very little relation to 
 the hazards to which women are actually exposed; 
 but they constitute a real barrier to industrial oppor- 
 tunity. On the whole, the vast and unwieldy array 
 of laws and rules designed either to protect the 
 woman worker, or to safeguard the future of the 
 race at her expense, are a pretty lame result of a 
 
Economic Position of Women 177 
 
 great deal of humanitarian sound and fury. Par- 
 turiunt montes. 
 
 It is quite natural that the result should be lame; 
 for these protections and safeguards represent so 
 many attempts to mind some one else’s business; 
 and the great difficulty about minding some one 
 else’s business is that however good one’s intentions 
 may be, one can never really know just where 
 that some one’s real interests lie, or perfectly under- 
 stand the circumstances under which he may be 
 most advantageously placed in the way to ad- 
 vance them, for the circumstances are too intimately 
 bound up with his peculiar temperament and situa- 
 tion. As Mill has remarked in a passage which I 
 have already quoted, the world has learned by long 
 experience that affairs in which the individual is 
 the person directly interested go right only when 
 they are left to his own. ilisoretion, and that any 
 interference by authority, save to protect the rights 
 of others, is mischievous. The tendency of modern 
 welfare-legislation is to make a complete sacrifice of 
 individual rights not to the rights but to the hypo- 
 thetical interests of others; and for every individual 
 who happens to benefit by the sacrifice, there is 
 another who suffers by it. If it is hard to regulate 
 
178 Concerning Women 
 
 one human being for his own good, it is impossible 
 to regulate people en masse for their own good; for 
 there is no way of making a general rule affect 
 all individuals in the same way, since no two in- 
 dividuals are to be found who are of precisely the 
 same temperament and in precisely the same situa- 
 tion. 
 
 There is in all this bungling effort to ameliorate 
 the ills of working women and to safeguard through 
 them the future of the race, a tacit recognition of 
 economic injustice and a strange incuriousness 
 about its causes. One would naturally expect that 
 the conditions which move people to seek protective 
 legislation would move them to question the nature 
 of an economic system which permits such rapacity 
 that any class of employees requires to be protected 
 from it. Surely the forces of righteousness must 
 know that there are reasons for the existence of the 
 conditions which move them to pity and alarm; yet 
 they seem quite willing to go on indefinitely battling 
 against the conditions, and winning with great ef- 
 fort legislative victories which are constantly being 
 rendered ineffectual through lax administration of 
 laws, through the reluctance of employees to jeopard- 
 ize their positions by testifying against employers, 
 
Economic Position of Women 179 
 
 or through unforeseen changes in economic condi- 
 tions. During all this waste of time and effort, 
 this building and crumbling and rebuilding of pro- 
 tective walls around the labourer, the causes of 
 economic injustice continue their incessant operation, 
 producing continuously a new crop of effects which 
 are like so many windmills inviting attack by the 
 Don Quixotes of reform. 
 
 Let us consider the effects of economic injustice 
 on women, side by side with the reformer’s work 
 upon those effects. Women in industry suffer, as 
 I have shown, the injustice of inequality with men 
 as regards wages, opportunities, training, and tenure 
 of employment. The reformer attacks the problem 
 of wages, and secures minimum-wage laws based on 
 some one’s theory of what constitutes a living wage. 
 No allowance is made for dependents because 
 women, theoretically, have none. The amount al- 
 lowed may from the first be inadequate, even for one 
 person, or it may be rendered inadequate by a rise in 
 the cost of living. In either case, it is purely arbi- 
 trary, and bears no relation whatever to the value of 
 the worker’s services. Still, such legislation might 
 be better than nothing if there were nothing better 
 to be done. The reformer is less zealous in his at- 
 
i8o Concerning Women 
 
 tempt to provide women with opportunities; his 
 showing in this field is less impressive than in that 
 of wages. Still, he has done something. If he has 
 not been entirely responsible for the opening to 
 women of many positions in government service, 
 he has at least greatly assisted in securing them these 
 opportunities. Farther than this, it must be ad- 
 mitted, it is difficult for him to go. He might, in- 
 deed, exert himself to see that women are provided 
 by one means or another with equal opportunities 
 to get training, but he can do little to affect the 
 policies of private employers of labour, who can 
 hardly be dictated to concerning whom they shall 
 hire and whom they shall retain. Nor can he pre- 
 vent employers from laying off women workers first 
 when there is a slowing down in production. In 
 three, then, out of four of the disadvantages which 
 bear more heavily on women in industry than on 
 men, the reformer, with all his excellent intentions, 
 is unable to be very helpful; while in his zeal to 
 safeguard the race, whose future appears to him 
 to depend entirely on the health of the female sex, 
 he has multiplied their disadvantages in the man- 
 ner I have already described, without, however, hav- 
 
Economic Position of Women 181 
 
 ing made any noteworthy advance toward the ac- 
 complishment of his purpose. 
 
 Now, had he chosen to inquire into the causes 
 of the artificial disabilities by which women workers 
 are handicapped, he might have discovered that these 
 and the industrial hazards which cause him such 
 grave concern may be traced to the same funda- 
 mental source; and that the just and only effective 
 way of removing these disabilities and hazards is 
 to eradicate the source. Women in industry are 
 the victims of traditional prejudices: I have shown 
 what those prejudices are — the id ea that w oman’s 
 pla ce is the home, that women workers hav e mo de- 
 pendents, that they work for pin-money and there- 
 fore do not need a living wage, that upon them alone $ < 
 depends the future health of the race. But as I 
 remarked at the beginning of this chapter, these 
 prejudices could not be turned to the disadvantage 
 of the woman worker if it were not for the over-* 
 crowding of the labour-market. So long as there 
 are more people looking for work than there are 
 jobs to be had, the advantage in fixing terms and 
 conditions of labour is on the side of the employer. 
 
 If men are obliged by their need to put up with 
 
1 82 Concerning Women 
 
 underpayment, women will be forced to accept an 
 even worse rate; if the tenure of men is uncertain, 
 that of women will be even more so. If the condi- 
 tions of industry are hazardous, the alternative of 
 starvation will force the workers to risk injury or 
 death unless the employer be required by law to 
 maintain the proper safeguards. Suppose, how- 
 ever, that labour were scarce, that for every worker 
 looking for employment there were a dozen em- 
 ployers looking for workers. Under such circum- 
 stances, the employer would be glad enough to hire 
 the worker who could fill his particular requirements, 
 without regard to sex, as employers did during the 
 war when labour was scarce; and he would pay the 
 worker a wage determined not by theory or prejudice, 
 but by the amount of competition for the worker’s 
 services. If the employment he offered were hazard- 
 ous, he would be obliged to maintain proper safe- 
 guards in order to retain his employees, and in 
 addition would probably be forced to pay them a 
 higher wage than they could earn in some safer 
 employment. If he did not do these things, his 
 workers would simply leave him for more satis- 
 factory positions. Nor would he be able to over- 
 work his employees, for if he attempted to do so, some 
 
Economic Position of Women 183 
 
 rival employer would outbid him for their services 
 by offering better hours and easier conditions of 
 labour. Thus the peculiar disabilities of women 
 workers would disappear with the disabilities of 
 labourers in general, and not a stroke of legislation 
 would be required to make industry both safe and 
 profitable for the woman worker. 
 
 This condition is not unnatural or impossible. 
 It is the present condition of chronic unemployent, 
 of expensive and ineffectual “welfare” legislation, 
 of wasteful and futile struggles between organized 
 capital and organized labour — it is this condition 
 that is entirely unnatural. I have mentioned its 
 cause in Chapter III, and I shall discuss it further 
 in my next chapter. Upon its removal, and not 
 upon regulations which hamper the woman worker 
 and reduce her to the status of a function, the fu- 
 ture of the race depends. The ancestors of com- 
 ing generations are men as well as women, and 
 posterity will derive its heritage of health from its 
 ancestors of both sexes. Its prospect of health will 
 not be improved by legislation calculated to safe- 
 guard the health of women workers, so long as the 
 children they bear continue to be exposed to an 
 involunta ry p overty which breeds ignorance, im- 
 
184 Concerning Women 
 
 becility, disease and crime. The happiness as well 
 as the health of future generations will depend in 
 great measure upon the extent to which both men 
 and women can release themselves from the deterio- 
 rating conditions of economic exploitation. 
 
 n 
 
 It is in business and in professional pursuits that 
 the occupational progress of women, and their eman- 
 cipation from traditional prejudices, are most 
 marked. Although in the lower ranks of labour 
 in these pursuits there is a mass of women who, 
 impelled by necessity, work for low wages at mechan- 
 ical tasks which offer no chance of advancement, 
 there is, nearer the top, a large group of women 
 who have been more fortunate in worldly position 
 and education, and who are spurred as much 
 either by interest in their work or a desire to be 
 self-supporting, as by actual need to earn; who 
 share, in other words, the attitude that leads young 
 men to strike out for themselves even though their 
 fathers may be able to support them. It is the 
 woman animated by these motives who is doing 
 most for the advancement of her sex; for it is she, 
 
Economic Position of Women 185 
 
 and not the woman who works through necessity, 
 who really challenges the traditional prejudices con- 
 cerning the proper place of women. The woman 
 labourer proves the need of women to earn ; the bus- 
 iness woman or professional woman who works 
 because she wants to work, is establishing the right 
 of women to earn. More than this, as she makes 
 her way into one after another of the occupations 
 that have been held to belong to men by prescriptive 
 right, she is establishing her claim, as a human 
 being, to choose her work from the whole wide field 
 of human activity. It is owing to the attitude to- 
 wards life adopted by such women, to their prefer- 
 ence of independence and action over the dependence 
 and passivity in vogue not so many years ago, that 
 it is coming to be quite the expected thing that young 
 women of the well-to-do classes shall .set out to 
 earn their living, as young men do, instead of stop- 
 ping under the parental roof, with a watchful eye 
 out for men who will marry and support them. 
 Need I remark that nothing is more likely than 
 this new attitude to bring about the substitution of 
 the “union by affection” for the union by interest? 
 The woman who is economically independent is 
 under much less temptation to marry from economic 
 
1 86 Concerning Women 
 
 motives than the woman for whom marriage rep- 
 resents the only prospect of security. 
 
 There is still a goodly number of prejudices and 
 discriminations to be overcome before women in 
 business and the professions shall stand on an equal 
 footing with men as regards opportunity and re- 
 muneration. Except where she is in business for 
 herself, the woman in these pursuits must generally 
 be content with a lower rate of pay than men; and 
 if observation may be taken to count for anything, 
 she is expected to work somewhat harder for what 
 she gets — less loafing on the job is tolerated in her 
 than in the male employee. She is also more likely 
 to find herself pocketed ; that is to say, in a position 
 from which, because of her sex, there is no possibil- 
 ity of further advance because the higher positions 
 are reserved for men. It is so universally the rule 
 that women must content themselves with reaching 
 the lower rungs of the occupational ladder, that 
 the instances where they manage to attain to places 
 of responsibility and authority are still rare enough 
 to be found worthy of remark in the press. The 
 same thing is true of political positions; women 
 are not yet represented in politics in anything like 
 a just proportion to their numbers, nor are they 
 
Economic Position of Women 187 
 
 often able to get themselves either elected or ap- 
 pointed to responsible positions. None the less, 
 considering the comparatively short time since their 
 emergence into the business world and the world 
 of public affairs, they are already making an ex- 
 cellent showing. 
 
 The world of business and the professions, like 
 the world of industry, has its occupations which are 
 considered peculiarly suitable for w r omen. Strictly 
 subordinate positions are thought to suit them very 
 well ; hence there is quite an army of women stenog- 
 raphers, bookkeepers, clerks and secretaries to be 
 found in the business section of any modem city. 
 The personnel of the nursing profession is made up 
 almost exclusively of women; and the work of 
 teaching in our public schools, especially where it 
 is most conspicuously underpaid, is largely in their 
 hands. There is, to be sure, an impression current 
 among members of school boards that marriage dis- 
 qualifies a woman for the teaching profession; but 
 the single woman is fairly secure in her position, 
 possibly because it does not pay well enough to be 
 very attractive to men. Occupations connected 
 with the arts are also held, in this country, to be 
 particularly well adapted for women, although it 
 
188 Concerning Women 
 
 must be noted that the prejudice of male musicians 
 is effective enough to exclude them from the per- 
 sonnel of our important orchestras. It is in the 
 creative arts that their work is most welcomed; 
 more especially in the field of literature; and this 
 may seem strange, in view of the fact that so many 
 eminent authorities believe that their sex renders 
 them incapable of attaining any significance in 
 creative work. It is, I apprehend, rather to the low 
 opinion in which aesthetic pursuits are held in this 
 country than to a high opinion of female ability, 
 that this peculiar condition must be ascribed. 
 
 But if certain occupations are considered pecul- 
 iarly appropriate for women, there is none the less a 
 great deal of prejudice against them in others. The 
 idea that woman’s place is the home has no more 
 disappeared from the world of business and the 
 professions than it has disappeared from the world 
 of industry, even though it is the business woman 
 and the professional woman who are doing most to 
 dislodge it. And here it may be well to remark a 
 fact that has already been noted, with some pointed 
 comment, by Ethel Snowden, namely: that woman’s 
 invasion of the gainful occupations appears to be 
 
Economic Position of Women 189 
 
 found unwomanly in proportion to the importance 
 of the position to which she aspires. 
 
 It is the married woman in business or in pro- 
 fessional work, as it is in industry, who suffers 
 most from the surviving prejudices concerning her 
 sex. When there are economies to be effected 
 through the discharge of workers, the idea that the 
 married woman is normally a dependent comes im- 
 mediately to the fore, and she is the first employee 
 to be discharged. For example, Equal Rights of 8 
 August, 1925, noted in an editorial that the city of 
 St. Louis had begun a campaign for economy by 
 discharging twelve married women; that there was 
 a movement on in Germany to reduce governmental 
 expenses by a wholesale discharge of women em- 
 ployees; and that, according to rumour, Mr. Coo- 
 lidge’s campaign of economy was being made to 
 bear most heavily on married women. The com- 
 ment of Equal Rights on the action of the city of 
 St. Louis is worth quoting: 
 
 St. Louis employed twenty-seven married women. 
 It investigated the economic condition of all these, re- 
 tained nine, discharged twelve, and was, at last report, 
 still considering the case of the other six. St. Louis 
 
190 Concerning Women 
 
 did not investigate the economic condition of the men 
 employees, to see whether or not these might continue 
 to live if they were discharged. St. Louis did not try 
 to find out whether or not these men had fathers, 
 brothers, mothers, or wives who might support them 
 while they were looking for other jobs. St. Louis as- 
 sumed that men have a right to economic independence 
 and the increased happiness and opportunity that it 
 brings. St. Louis assumed that women have no such 
 right. 
 
 In other words, St. Louis assumed, as the German 
 and American Governments apparently assume, and 
 as most private employers assume, that women are 
 employed on sufferance; especially married women. 
 Of course it should be remembered that the position 
 of the married woman in this respect is only worse 
 than that of single women, and that the position of 
 women is only worse than that of men; for, as I 
 have already remarked, under a monopolistic eco- 
 nomic system the opportunity to earn a living by 
 one’s labour comes to be regarded as a privilege in- 
 stead of a natural right. Women are simply held 
 to be less entitled to this privilege than men. 
 
 That marriage should so often assume the nature 
 of a disability for the woman who either wishes 
 
Economic Position of Women 191 
 
 or is obliged to earn, whereas it often operates in 
 favour of the male worker, may be attributed to 
 the traditional assumption that married women are 
 dependent on, and subject to, their husbands. I 
 remarked in the preceding chapter that the married 
 woman who wishes to engage in business finds her- 
 self, in many communities, hampered by legal dis- 
 abilities arising from her marital status, whereas 
 her husband is under no corresponding disabilities. 
 Her position as an industrial and salaried worker 
 is rendered insecure if not by law, at least by the. 
 same psychology that keeps legal disabilities in 
 force. This psychology may be defined as the ex- 
 pectation that a woman when she marries shall, 
 surrender a much greater degree of personal free- 
 dom than the man she marries. The man who 
 does not object to his wife’s having a career is con- 
 sidered generous and long-suffering. His insist- 
 ence on her abandoning it and contenting herself 
 with looking out for his domestic comfort is thought 
 to be quite natural . 1 On the other hand, the woman 
 
 1 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule ; as when a woman 
 has, before her marriage, already made a great reputation. In such 
 a case the husband would be thought selfish who demanded the 
 sacrifice of her career. But the husband who demands the sacrifice 
 of a potential career is generally thought to be well within his 
 rights. 
 
192 Concerning Women 
 
 who interferes in any way with a husband’s career 
 is regarded as an extremely selfish person; while 
 any sacrifice of herself and her ambitions to her 
 husband and his, is thought of merely as a matter 
 of wifely duty. How often does one hear that such 
 and such a woman has given up her position be- 
 cause “her husband didn’t want her to work.” 
 There is, too, a very general assumption that every 
 married woman has children and should stay at 
 home and take care of them. Now, perhaps every 
 married woman should have children; perhaps in a 
 future state of society men and women will marry 
 only when they wish to bring up a family. But at 
 present it is not so; therefore at present the as- 
 sumption that a married woman should stay at home 
 and take care of her children leaves out of account 
 the fact that a large and increasing number of mar- 
 ried women are childless. It may be contended 
 that these women should stay at home and take care 
 of their husbands; but even if we assume that the 
 unremitting personal attention of his wife is es- 
 sential to the comfort and happiness of a married 
 man, there would still remain the question of his 
 title to this attention at the cost of her own interests. 
 
 We are dealing here with an attitude which, gen- 
 
Economic Position of Women 193 
 
 eral though it be, has been outmoded by the condi- 
 tions of modern life. The sexual division of in- 
 terests and labour which has been insisted upon so 
 long among European peoples does not very well 
 fit in with the organization of industrial and social 
 life in the twentieth century. Our social ideology, 
 like our political ideology, is of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury; and its especial effectiveness at present is by 
 way of obscuring our vision of the changed world 
 that has emerged from the great economic revolu- 
 tion of the last century. A division of interests and 
 labour which was convenient if not just under the 
 conditions of economic and social life which pre- 
 ceded the industrial revolution, is neither convenient 
 nor just under the conditions which prevail today. 
 The care of young children and the management of 
 a household may result in an unequal division of 
 labour in families where the husband’s inability 
 to provide for the needs of his family forces the 
 wife to assume the burdens of a breadwinner. 
 When one reads through the literature on the ques- 
 tion of hours of labour for women in industry, one 
 is struck by the persistent stressing of the married 
 woman’s double burden of breadwinning and house- 
 keeping. These women, it seems, must not only 
 
194 Concerning Women 
 
 earn money to contribute to their families’ support, 
 but they must, before setting out for work and after 
 returning from it, prepare the family meals, get the 
 children ready for school or the day-nursery, take 
 them there and call for them, wash, sew, and per- 
 form a hundred other household tasks. This 
 double burden is often made an argument for estab- 
 lishing shorter hours of work for women in indus- 
 try, but never for expecting the husband to share 
 the wife’s traditional burden as she has been forced 
 to share his. I have no doubt that innumerable 
 husbands are doing this; but there is no expecta- 
 tion put upon them to do it, and those who do not 
 are in no wise thought to shirk their duty to their 
 families, as their wives would be thought to do 
 if they neglected to perform the labour of the house- 
 hold. 
 
 Quite analogous to this attitude of the advocates 
 of special legislation for working women is that of 
 the people who concern themselves with the so-called 
 problem of the educated woman, which is supposed 
 to be that of reconciling domesticity with intellectual 
 pursuits. A timely illustration of this attitude is 
 the establishment by Smith College of an institute 
 for the “co-ordination of women’s interests.” The 
 
Economic Position of Women 195 
 
 purpose of this institute, in the words of President 
 Neilson, is “to find a solution of the problem which 
 confronts almost every educated woman today — 
 how to reconcile a normal life of marriage and 
 motherhood with a life of intellectual activity, pro- 
 fessional or otherwise.” Here again is the tacit 
 assumption that marriage is the special concern of 
 woman, and one whose claims must take precedence 
 over her other interests, whatever they may be; that 
 marriage and motherhood constitute her normal life, 
 and her other interests something extra-normal 
 which must somehow be made to fit in if possible. 
 I have heard of no institute intended to find a way 
 to reconcile the normal life of marriage and father- 
 hood with a life of intellectual activity, professional 
 or otherwise; although when one considers how 
 many educated men of today are obliged to com- 
 promise with their consciences in order to secure 
 themselves in positions which will enable them to 
 provide for their families, one is persuaded that 
 some such institute might be at least equally ap- 
 propriate and equally helpful with that which 
 Smith College has established. 
 
 Let us forget for a moment the sophisticated tradi- 
 tional attitude toward this question of marriage and 
 
196 Concerning Women 
 
 parenthood, and go back, as it were, to the begin- 
 ning — to a fact recognized in the animal world and 
 not entirely overlooked by primitive man, namely: 
 that every offspring has two parents who are equally 
 responsible for its care and protection. In the ani- 
 mal kingdom one finds a widely varied division of 
 the labour connected with the care of the young. 
 For example, the male of certain species is found 
 to perform functions which our own usage has led 
 us to regard as maternal. Among the viviparous 
 animals the heavier share of responsibility rests with 
 the female during the gestation, birth and extreme 
 youth of the offspring ; and among primitive human 
 beings the actual physical dependence of the off- 
 spring on the mother is likely to be prolonged over 
 a period of several years. It was, perhaps, this 
 necessity of a close physical association between 
 mother and child that led to a sexual division of 
 labour under which the mother undertook the phys- 
 ical care of children while the father undertook 
 the task of providing food. It must be remarked, 
 however, that this division of labour by no means ex- 
 cludes productive labour on the part of the woman. 
 Among most tribes she augments the food-supply 
 through agriculture, (grubbing, or sometimes through 
 
Economic Position of Women 197 
 
 fishing or hunting; and there are tribes, notably in 
 Africa, where she is the sole provider for the family. 
 The Vaertings have remarked that the drudgery con- 
 nected with the care of children is invariably im- 
 posed by the dominant upon the subject sex; a 
 view which is in perfect consonance with what we 
 know of the general human willingness to transfer 
 to other shoulders the burden of uninteresting 
 though necessary labour. Since women have most 
 often been subject, they have most often been forced 
 to undertake this drudgery, either in lieu of or in 
 addition to the labour of providing food and shelter 
 for their families. 
 
 This is to say that their subject position has 
 added considerably to what newspaper editors and 
 other commentators are fond of calling the burden 
 of Eve. Since woman is the childbearing sex, it 
 has seemed natural to a great many peoples to in- 
 crease the disadvantage at which her share in re- 
 production naturally places her, by making her con- 
 finement at home permanent instead of occasional, 
 and by permitting her few, if any, interests save 
 those connected with reproduction ; in short, by pro- 
 longing and enhancing her subjection to the de- 
 mands of the race. This is why the term married 
 
198 Concerning Women 
 
 woman is still taken to imply the term housekeeper; 
 an implication which, as the Freeman remarked 
 editorially some years ago, modern civilization must 
 renounce “if it wants such of its women as are edi- 
 tors and bank-presidents to be mothers as well.” 
 
 Civilization shortens the period of the child’s 
 physical dependence on the mother by shortening 
 the period of lactation. On the other hand, it in- 
 creases fecundity to such an extent that where re- 
 ligious superstition or ignorance prevents the use 
 of contraceptives, the burden of childbearing is 
 greatly increased. This result of civilization is 
 not, however, commonly found among the educated 
 classes; and even among those classes where chil- 
 dren are most numerous, I have already shown that 
 women are not restrained by motherhood from en- 
 gaging in gainful occupations outside the home. 
 On the contrary, the number of their offspring is 
 more often their chief incentive to this course. 
 Among well-to-do families, prepared foods and wet- 
 nursing have for a long time been rather generally 
 employed to relieve mothers even of the responsi- 
 bility of lactation, while the custom of assigning the 
 physical care of children to hired substitutes has 
 reduced their actual work to that of bringing the 
 
Economic Position of Women 199 
 
 child into the world. That this mode of caring for 
 children is approved by all classes is evident from 
 their readiness to adopt it when fortune favours 
 them with an opportunity. It is occasionally in- 
 veighed against by moralists, but on the whole it is 
 coveted and approved, especially while women de- 
 vote to frivolous pursuits the leisure that it leaves 
 them. When a woman adopts this mode in order 
 to reconcile motherhood with a serious interest out- 
 side the home, it is a different matter, and lays her 
 open to the charge of neglecting her family, though 
 in fact she may spend no more hours away from 
 home than the woman who gives her morning to 
 shopping and her afternoon to playing bridge. 
 Why this should be the case I am at a loss to know, 
 unless it be that a serious interest outside the home 
 appears to smack too much of an assertion of her 
 right to live her life for her own sake rather than 
 for the sake of the race or that of her husband — a 
 self-assertion not readily to be accepted without such 
 reservations as find expression in institutes designed 
 to “co-ordinate women’s interests.” 
 
 It appears, then, that the care of the young is the 
 concern of both sexes, and is so recognized in the 
 animal world and among human beings; and that 
 
200 Concerning Women 
 
 among the latter such differences in usage as exist 
 touching this matter are differences in the appor- 
 tioning of the burden. Even in our own day, when 
 there is observable a tendency to forget that the 
 child has more than one parent — that parent being 
 the mother — the father’s claim to his children is 
 still recognized in law, often to the prejudice of the 
 mother’s; and so, likewise, is his obligation to pro- 
 vide for them. Indeed, the child may be said to 
 be regarded as exclusively the mother’s only while 
 it is young; for it is a general custom among us to 
 speak of Mrs. So-and-So’s baby, but of Mr. So- 
 and-So’s son or daughter. (Let us, then, recognize 
 the claim and interest of both parents. Let us also 
 remember that the economic organization has so ex- 
 tensively altered that the traditional division of 
 labour — this division is always profoundly affected 
 by consideration of the young — has been outmoded 
 as far as thousands of families are concerned. Let 
 us also assume that woman has established her right 
 to be considered as a human being rather than a 
 function or a chattel. Then it must seem reason- 
 able to assume that the co-ordination of interests to 
 be brought about concerns both sexes equally; that 
 the problem to be confronted is that of reconciling 
 
Economic Position of Women 201 
 
 a normal life of marriage and parenthood not only 
 with the freest possible development of intellectual 
 interest but with the utmost devotion to any chosen 
 profession. 
 
 I can not pretend to foretell how this problem will 
 be settled; for its solution will depend upon the gen- 
 eral solution of the labour-problem. It may be 
 that the necessary collectivism of modern industry 
 will result in a collectivist system of caring for chil- 
 dren. Such a system would by no means be an in- 
 novation; it would simply constitute an extension 
 and adaptation of means which already exist — of 
 nurseries for very small children and schools for 
 older ones. Whatever its demerits might be, such a 
 system would certainly represent an enormous econ- 
 omy of effort. The average home is adapted less 
 to the needs of children than to those of adults; 
 hence a mother of young children must spend a 
 great deal of her time in preventing her young 
 charges from injuring themselves with dangerous 
 household implements, from falling downstairs or 
 off of furniture too high for them, and from touch- 
 ing objects which would not be safe in their hands. 
 In a properly equipped nursery, on the other hand, 
 the furniture and all the objects are adapted to the 
 
202 Concerning Women 
 
 size and intelligence of the children. Children 
 have the advantage of numerous playmates; and 
 one person can supervise the play of a dozen of 
 them with less fatigue than the mother of one is 
 likely to feel at the end of a day in the average 
 home. 
 
 The Russians have already taken some steps in 
 this direction by establishing both nurseries and 
 schools in connexion with certain factories. From 
 what I can gather of their policy, it would seem that 
 they regard the care and education of children as 
 being very much the concern of the whole commu- 
 nity. They look upon childbearing as a service to 
 the community, but they do not appear to take the 
 view that women should be required to perform this 
 service at the expense of their independence, for 
 they have instituted a system of subsidies for preg- 
 nant and nursing working mothers, with rest- 
 periods before and after confinement, and a sub- 
 sidy during confinement amounting to the daily 
 subsidy multiplied by fifteen . 1 
 
 I have already indicated in the preceding chapter 
 
 1 From the Laws and Decrees of the Soviet Government on medi- 
 cal questions, sanitation, etc., published in Moscow, 1922. 
 
Economic Position of Women 203 
 
 what it seems to me would be the course of a free 
 people in this matter of reconciling the care of chil- 
 dren with the greatest possible freedom for both 
 parents. It seems hardly necessary to call attention 
 to the obvious fact that the question is simply that 
 of placing the care of the young in the hands of 
 those who are interested in it and fitted for it, instead 
 of forcing it willy-nilly upon either sex through a 
 traditional expectation and a traditional division of 
 labour. In a free society, those parents who wished 
 to pursue careers incompatible with the actual care 
 of young children would avail themselves of the 
 services of substitutes, as the well-to-do classes do 
 at present; and they might do so with even greater 
 confidence because, as I have remarked, those en- 
 gaged in caring for and teaching the young would 
 do so as a matter of interest primarily and only 
 secondarily as a means of livelihood. There is 
 another important consideration to be taken into 
 account, and that is, that in a free society the prob- 
 lem of reconciling the occupations of the parents 
 with their personal supervision of their children 
 would be much easier to solve; for their hours of 
 labour would be greatly decreased. It is only where 
 
204 Concerning Women 
 
 production must support an enormous amount of 
 idleness and waste that it is necessary to overwork 
 producers. 
 
 It is possible, of course, that the institution of 
 economic freedom might check the present tendency 
 of women to engage in gainful occupations outside 
 the home. It most certainly would if the vast in- 
 crease of opportunity which it offered were reserved 
 exclusively for men; but to bring about this result 
 it would be necessary for traditional anti-feminist 
 prejudices to survive much more strongly than they 
 do today. The position of women has too radically 
 changed to admit of their exclusion from direct 
 participation in the benefits of economic freedom; 
 therefore if they resigned the increased economic 
 opportunities that it offered them, and withdrew to 
 the sphere of domesticity, they would do so as a 
 matter of choice. Why should we not expect them 
 to choose the exclusive domesticity which might be 
 rendered possible through the increased earning 
 power of men? They probably would, where it 
 suited their taste to do so; but one of the most power- 
 ful incentives to do so would no longer exist, 
 namely: the desire for economic security. Women, 
 to be sure, are not exempt from the characteristic 
 
Economic Position of Women 205 
 
 willingness of humankind to live by the exertions 
 of others ; but I would remark that there is this dif- 
 ference between the person who does this indirectly, 
 through legalized privilege, and the person who de- 
 pends directly on the bounty of another: that the 
 former is independent and the latter is dependent. 
 Women are not strangers to the human desire for 
 freedom; and when the fear of want is allayed they 
 are quite likely to prefer an easy and secure self- 
 support to the alternative of economic depehdence. 
 Moreover, economic freedom would set domesticity 
 in competition with the interests of women rather 
 than their needs; for it would set all people free to 
 engage in occupations that interested them, whereas 
 at present the vast majority do whatever offers them 
 a living. Under these circumstances it might rea- 
 sonably be expected that the number of women who 
 would continue in business and in industrial and 
 professional pursuits, even after marriage and the 
 birth of children, would greatly increase. 
 
 Indeed, if we postulate an economic system under 
 which every human being would be free to choose 
 his occupation in accordance with his interests, I 
 see no more reason to suppose that women would 
 invariably choose domesticity than to suppose that 
 
2o6 Concerning Women 
 
 all men would choose blacksmithing. Under such 
 a regime I doubt that even the power of the expected 
 which affects them so strongly at present, would 
 long continue in an effectiveness which it has al- 
 ready begun to lose. Women, I think, might be 
 expected to choose their occupations with the same 
 freedom as men, and to look for no serious interrup- 
 tion from marriage and the birth of children. 
 There are a good many women at present who very 
 ably reconcile motherhood with a chosen career. 
 I think we might expect to find more of them rather 
 than fewer, in a free society. One thing is certain, 
 and it is the important thing: they would be free 
 to choose. If it be woman’s nature, as some people 
 still believe, to wish to live at second hand, then in 
 a free society they will freely make that choice, and 
 no one can complain of it — unless it be the men on 
 whom they elect to depend. However, to assume 
 from past experience that they do want to live at 
 second hand is to assume that all the social and 
 legal injustices which have been employed to force 
 them to do so, were unnecessary; and when have 
 Governments and communities wasted their power 
 in exercising compulsion where no compulsion was 
 needed ? 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHAT IS TO BE DONE 
 I 
 
 In the foregoing chapters I have intimated that 
 every phase of the question of freedom for women 
 is bound up with the larger question of human 
 freedom. If it is freedom that women want, they 
 can not be content to be legally equal with men; 
 but having gained this equality they must carry on 
 their struggle against the oppressions which privi- 
 lege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of 
 an usurped economic power. All human beings, 
 presumably, would gain by freedom; but women 
 particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, 
 they are victims of special prepossessions which 
 mere legal equality with men may hardly be ex- 
 pected to affect. 
 
 If, on the other hand, it is dominance that they 
 desire, they might, indeed, conceivably attain this 
 without freedom; but one can not see much encour- 
 agement for that wish in the present trend of affairs. 
 Before women could dominate, they would not only 
 
 20 7 
 
208 Concerning Women 
 
 have to overcome the prejudices, superstitions, and 
 legal disabilities which have contributed to their 
 subjection; but they would also have to get the 
 upper hand of men economically. They would 
 have to manoeuvre themselves into that advantage 
 in opportunity which men at present enjoy. One 
 can hardly see how this could be brought about ex- 
 cept by some kind of coup d’etat, for the tendency 
 of modern legislation, as I have shown, far from 
 being calculated to enlarge the scope of women’s 
 economic activity, is likely rather to narrow it; nor 
 is it entirely probable that the establishment of 
 mere legal equality would count for much in the 
 premises, for the courts may always decide that any 
 legislation designed for the Larger Good is valid 
 even though it may clash with the principle of equal 
 rights . 1 Suppose, however, that the momentum 
 gathered by the woman’s movement should carry 
 society through a period of sex-equality and bring 
 it out on the other side — the side of female domina- 
 
 1 Still, putting tlie shoe on the other foot, there is no denying 
 that discriminative legislation based on the Larger Good might as 
 well serve to secure to women privileges which would lead toward 
 female domination, as to create disabilities which would keep them 
 at a disadvantage compared with men. Even the United States 
 Supreme Court has been known to reverse itself. 
 
What Is To Be Done 209 
 
 tion — then men and women would simply have ex- 
 changed places, and the social evils which now 
 afflict mankind would remain, mutatis mutandis. 
 Women would be more nearly free than men, as 
 men are now more nearly free than women; but no 
 one would be really free, because real freedom is 
 not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one 
 sex to the other or from one class to another. Real 
 freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and 
 primarily of economic advantage. It can not be 
 too often repeated that political and social freedom 
 are unattainable unless and until economic freedom 
 has been attained — but this is not a concern of 
 either sex or class. In order to live, women, like 
 men, must eat; to eat, they, like men, must labour; 
 to labour, they, like men, must have opportunity. 
 Control of men’s and women’s economic opportu- 
 nity, therefore, means control of their livelihood, and 
 control of men’s and women’s livelihood means con- 
 trol of men and women. Real freedom, therefore, 
 does not come in sight of either men or women until 
 this control is abated; that is to say, until (speaking 
 in technical terms) the two active factors in pro- 
 duction, capital and labour, which are pro tanto 
 
2io Concerning Women 
 
 sexless, have free access to the passive factor, nat- 
 ural resources — in other words, until the private 
 monopoly of natural resources is dissolved. 
 
 If the struggle of women to rid themselves of 
 their peculiar disabilities were to turn out into an 
 attempt to dominate men as men have for so long 
 dominated women, one could perfectly understand 
 the psychology behind such an attempt. With the 
 exception of a few individuals, humankind has 
 thus far achieved no very high idea of freedom. 
 The ambition of subject classes has never gone 
 much beyond the desire to enjoy the privileges 
 usurped by their masters. They have resented be- 
 ing dominated, but not domination; they have had 
 no repugnance to the thought of dominating others. 
 Their psychology was very well summed up by 
 Punch, in the remark of one old market-woman to 
 another (I quote from memory): “You see, Mrs. 
 
 , when we have a Labour Government we’ll all 
 
 be equal, and then I shall have a servant to do my 
 work for me.” It is because of this myopic view 
 of the nature of freedom that all revolutions have 
 been mere scrambles for advantage, and have ac- 
 complished nothing more than a shifting of power 
 from one class to another, or as John Adams said, 
 
What Is To Be Done 
 
 21 1 
 
 “a mere change of impostors.” If the woman’s 
 movement should resolve itself into a similar scram- 
 ble, it would be unfortunate but not surprising, for 
 women may hardly be expected to rise at once above 
 the retaliatory spirit which is one of the common 
 curses of humanity. 
 
 They would have good ex parte arguments ready 
 to their tongue; many an argument, indeed, which 
 has been advanced to defend their subjection might 
 be effectively turned around. Their part in parent- 
 hood for example, has long been held to justify 
 their subjection under the guise of protection in this 
 function. It would be equally logical to argue that 
 women, as mothers of the race, should dominate the 
 family because, as givers of life, they have a deeper 
 personal interest and a greater natural right in their 
 children than men have. It might be argued that 
 they should control all public affairs because of the 
 greater understanding of the value of human life 
 and deeper interest in the welfare of humanity that 
 motherhood brings. One often hears the argument 
 — which no amount of female bloodthirst in time 
 of war ever seems to make effectively ridiculous — 
 that if women were in pow T er there would be no 
 wars, because they, knowing the cost of giving life, 
 
212 Concerning Women 
 
 would not consent to its wilful wholesale destruc- 
 tion. The doctrine that women are closer to the race 
 than men is really dangerous to those who now 
 preach it; for it affords the best kind of basis for 
 the contention that women should dominate in all 
 matters concerning the race— and all human affairs 
 may be held to concern the race in one way or an- 
 other. 
 
 Perhaps the best argument for the domination of 
 women is that if society, like parliamentary govern- 
 ment, must for ever contemplate a mere sterile suc- 
 cession of outs and ins, it is time that women had 
 their innings. But the analogy with the parlia- 
 mentary system goes further. Public faith in the 
 parliamentary principle has waned almost to the dis- 
 appearing-point, and the system has suffered whole- 
 sale discredit, because it became slowly but surely 
 evident that what actually kept them up was “the 
 cohesive power of public plunder.” If women 
 took what might be called by analogy the political 
 view of their right to their innings, and let it ani- 
 mate them in a scuffle for predominance, the gen- 
 eral reaction would be similar. In a matter of this 
 kind, great numbers of people would be found ob- 
 
What Is To Be Done 213 
 
 jective enough to glance at such an effort and pass 
 it by in disapproval of the waste of energy involved 
 in bringing about a readjustment that promised 
 nothing better than a shifting of the incidence of 
 injustice. Women would thus forfeit a great deal 
 of sympathy, and at the same time probably create 
 even more antagonism than they have thus far had 
 to face. They would place themselves in a position 
 similar to that of organized labour, which is so 
 intent on contending for what it conceives to be its 
 own interest — a position of advantage in bargain- 
 ing on wages and conditions of labour — that by the 
 narrowness of its policy it antagonizes a great deal 
 of public sentiment which must inevitably be en- 
 listed on its behalf if it undertook to contend for 
 the general interest, in which its own is included, 
 and in the service of which its own is bound, in the 
 long run, to be best served. 
 
 What the nature of this general interest is, I 
 have already intimated. It is economic, and it can 
 be advanced only through the establishment of an 
 order of society in which every human being shall 
 enjoy the natural right to labour and to enjoy all 
 that his labour produces. It is upon mankind’s 
 
214 Concerning Women 
 
 security in this right that human freedom, in what- 
 ever mode or aspect — social, philosophical, politi- 
 cal, religious — primarily depends. 
 
 The right to labour and to enjoy the fruits of 
 one’s labour means only the right of free access to 
 the source of subsistence, which is land . 1 If access 
 to that source may be arbitrarily denied, the right 
 to labour is denied, and the opportunity to get one’s 
 living becomes a privilege which may be withheld 
 or granted as suits the need or convenience of the 
 person who bestows it, and wholly on his own terms. 
 If access may be had only on the payment of trib- 
 ute, the condition abrogates the right to enjoy the 
 fruit of one’s labour, for the tribute consumes a 
 share of it. 
 
 While access to land is free, no one need know 
 want; for he may always get his living by apply- 
 ing his labour to natural resources “on his own.” 
 He may always, that is, work for himself instead 
 of depending for his living on the chance to work 
 for an employer. Under such conditions, more- 
 over, no one need content himself, as the labourer 
 is forced to content himself at present, with a small 
 
 1 Land, that is, in the technical economic sense. It does not 
 mean the solid part of the earth’s surface — earth as distinguished 
 from water. It means the sum-total of natural resources. 
 
What Is To Be Done 215 
 
 share of what his labour produces, for as Turgot 
 pointed out a century and a half ago, he can always 
 demand of an employer the full equivalent of what 
 he could earn by working for himself. It is clear 
 that under such an economic system, the share of 
 the capitalist in any product would amount only 
 to a fair competitive return on his actual invest- 
 ment. Under the present system the capitalist 
 often enjoys both directly and indirectly the ad- 
 vantage of monopoly, which enables him to appro- 
 priate an unfair proportion of his workers’ labour- 
 product. He is a direct beneficiary of monopoly 
 when he holds legal title to the source of his prod- 
 uct — cultivable land, mines, forests, water-power 
 — or where he holds franchises or profits by pro- 
 tective tariffs or embargoes. He is an indirect 
 beneficiary when he profits by the competition for 
 work among workers whom monopoly has deprived 
 of free access to land. The steel-trust, as I have 
 remarked, is a striking example of a capitalist or- 
 ganization which benefits both directly and indi- 
 rectly by monopoly. On the one hand, it monopo- 
 lizes and holds out of access vast mining-properties, 
 and monopolizes the home market through a pro- 
 tective tariff. On the other, it levies tribute on la- 
 
2i6 Concerning Women 
 
 hour by virtue of the scarcity of opportunity created 
 by monopoly in general. 
 
 Another excellent instance of this dual advan- 
 tage is furnished by the railways of this country. 
 Not only have they received governmental land- 
 grants worth enough to cover their construction- 
 costs many times over, but they hold a valuable 
 franchise-monopoly in the exclusive right to do 
 business over a long continuous strip of land 
 called their “right of way”; by means of which 
 monopoly they drain the commerce of a vast area 
 as a river drains its waters. Through the enor- 
 mous wealth which these monopolies have enabled 
 them to accumulate, they have been able to influ- 
 ence governmental policy in ways designed to en- 
 hance their privileges; for example, they have been 
 able to curtail water-transportation and thus reduce 
 competition. They have profited by tariffs, as 
 through the emergency-law some years ago, which 
 raised the tariff on wheat just enough to cover the 
 difference between the cost of landing a bushel of 
 wheat from the Argentine at one of our Eastern 
 ports, and the rate for transporting it by railway 
 from our Western wheat-fields. Through the In- 
 terstate Commerce Commission, of which they cap- 
 
What Is To Be Done 217 
 
 lured control almost as soon as it was formed, they 
 are allowed to levy rates which represent not the 
 cost of transportation but the amount which can be 
 exacted for it. So much for their direct benefit 
 from monopoly. Indirectly they benefit in the 
 same way as any other capitalist, through the oppor- 
 tunity to exploit a labour-surplus created and 
 maintained by monopoly; and while they are some- 
 what hindered in making the most of this oppor- 
 tunity by the effectiveness of defensive organiza- 
 tion among their skilled employees, they have a 
 pretty free hand with their thousands of unskilled 
 workers, and manage on the whole to do very well 
 out of them. 
 
 Even where the capitalist is not himself to any 
 significant extent a monopolist,, he derives great 
 benefit from monopoly, for it is thanks to the mo- 
 nopolist of natural resources that he is able to keep 
 labourers at, or very near, the margin of subsistence. 
 He is not always, however, undisturbed in the en- 
 joyment of his advantage; for he may be himself 
 quite as much at the mercy of monopoly as the 
 workers he exploits. The tenant-farmer affords an 
 excellent example of this. He is the capitalist in 
 the farming-industry, who pays to the land-monop- 
 
218 Concerning Women 
 
 olist tribute in the form of rent, to the railways 
 tribute in exorbitant freight-rates on his imple- 
 ments and products, to the manufacturers of his 
 implements tribute in the form of tariffs. He fur- 
 nishes the capital necessary for operating the farm, 
 pays the wages of such labour as he may require, 
 and takes for himself what is left after all these 
 charges have been met, which in this country is so 
 little that it does not suffice to pay him both interest 
 on his capital and wages for his own labour — a 
 condition which explains the steady drift of our pop- 
 ulation from the farms to the cities, and which also 
 accounts for the extraordinary fact that agriculture, 
 which is in volume our greatest industry is, qua in- 
 dustry, bankrupt. All the money in farming is 
 now, and for some time has been, in the rise of land- 
 values. It is evident, then, that save where capital 
 and monopoly are united, capital as well as labour 
 is victimized by monopoly. This is one of the most 
 important facts of our system, and almost every- 
 one overlooks it. The whole producing organi- 
 zation is levied upon by a power which itself per- 
 forms no service whatever in return for the wealth 
 that it appropriates; which is, on the contrary, an in- 
 cubus on the producing organization. To put this 
 
What Is To Be Done 219 
 
 statement more clearly, the monopolist, whose con- 
 trol of the sources of production makes his exactions 
 inescapable, is limited in those exactions only by the 
 amount that the traffic will bear. If a condition 
 arises which makes a certain kind of production es- 
 pecially desirable, there will naturally be a pressure 
 of people desiring to undertake that kind of produc- 
 tion, and the monopolist who controls its source will 
 exact in payment for access to that source an amount 
 fixed by the number of competitors seeking access. 
 He is thus able to absorb all the returns of the in- 
 dustry which depends on his monopoly, except just 
 so much as is necessary to encourage people to keep 
 on with it. For example, during the war the own- 
 ers of our Western wheat-lands, who had been de- 
 manding one-third of the crop in rent, raised the 
 amount to two-fifths, because at the price fixed by 
 the Government wheat-growing was profitable and 
 there were many would-be producers seeking access 
 to wheat-lands. The same condition was reflected 
 in the selling price of land. Farms were sold and 
 resold at advancing prices until land that had sold 
 before the war for sixty-five dollars an acre was 
 bringing two hundred. During the period of de- 
 flation thousands of acres bought on mortgages 
 
220 Concerning Women 
 
 reverted from one buyer to another until the original 
 owner had back his land plus whatever profit he 
 had had from its sale. All this raising of rents and 
 this buying and selling at inflated prices, did nothing 
 for production, obviously, except to drain off the 
 lion’s share of its proceeds into the pocket of the 
 monopolist; for all speculative values must necessar- 
 ily be paid finally out of production, since there is no 
 other source for them to come from. The produc- 
 ing organization thus carries an enormous load of 
 people who draw their living from it and give neither 
 goods nor services in return ; who live, that is to say, 
 by appropriating the labour-products of others with- 
 out compensation — in other words, by legalized 
 theft. 
 
 As monopoly extends and tightens its grip on the 
 sources of production, it is enabled to exact an in- 
 creasing share of the proceeds, until the point is 
 reached where industry can no longer meet its de- 
 mands and continue to pay interest and wages. For 
 example, so long as this country had a frontier, the 
 monopolist was in no position to exact a very great 
 share of production, for the producer had the alter- 
 native of pushing on to the margin of cultivation 
 where there were as yet no landlords to support. 
 
What Is To Be Done 
 
 221 
 
 The monopolist, therefore, could exact no more than 
 the difference between what a man might earn in a 
 sparsely settled country, remote from markets, and 
 what he could earn by carrying on production in a 
 more thickly settled and more nearly monopolized 
 region. So long as this condition endured, produc- 
 tion in this country was able to pay tribute to monop- 
 oly and still pay the capitalist a fairly good rate of 
 interest and the labourer a fairly good wage. But 
 since the late nineteenth century, when the frontier 
 was closed, all the best of the country’s land and 
 natural resources being legally occupied, monopoly 
 has been able to exact an ever greater share of pro- 
 duction; for while monopoly progresses, the popula- 
 tion grows, and competitive demand for access to 
 the source of production increases; and these two 
 causes combine to cut down free economic opportu- 
 nity to the disappearing point. Thus it seems only a 
 matter of time until production will break down 
 under the exactions of monopoly and revolution and 
 readjustment will follow. The breakdown has al- 
 ready begun in the basic industry, agriculture, for, 
 as I have stated above, the tenant farmer is no longer 
 able to meet the charges of monopoly and still earn 
 interest and wages. Therefore our agrarian popu- 
 
222 Concerning Women 
 
 lation, literally starved off the land, is steadily drift- 
 ing to the cities, to swell the numbers of workers who 
 crowd the industrial labour-market. This is to say 
 that our civilization is dying at the root; and this 
 having presently grown too rotten to nourish it or 
 support it, a little wind of revolution or foreign in- 
 vasion will one day overturn it, as all civilizations 
 which have hitherto existed have been overturned by 
 the same cause. “Latifundia,” said Pliny, “per- 
 diderunt Romam.” 
 
 This same economic system exists in all the great 
 countries of the world save Russia, where it broke 
 down under the Czarist regime and has not been 
 re-established. It is farther advanced in the coun- 
 tries of the old world than it is here, because this 
 country is more recently settled. This fact con- 
 stitutes the only difference between the economic 
 order in the old world and that in the new — a dif- 
 ference in the degree that exploitation has reached. 
 
 Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new 
 world or the old, it exists by means of a governmen- 
 tal organization which its beneficiaries control and 
 use to protect their privileges against the expro- 
 priated and exploited masses. There is general 
 agreement among scholars that in government, ex- 
 
What Is To Be Done 223 
 
 ploitation came first, and what we know as law and 
 order are its incidental by-products; and that how- 
 ever far the development of these by-products may 
 go, they are never allowed to interfere with exploita- 
 tion. “The State,” says Oppenheimer, “grew from 
 the subjugation of one group of men by another. 
 Its basic justification, its raison d’etre, was and is 
 the economic exploitation of those subjugated.” 
 Both the origin and the essential nature of the State 
 remain perfectly clear so long as the conquering 
 class remains distinct from the subject classes and 
 keeps these in a state of vassalage, without freedom 
 of movement, and subject to transfer from one owner 
 to another along with the land on which they dwell. 
 In our own age, they are quite evident in the deal- 
 ings of the Western powers with weak peoples, as in 
 India or the Philippine Islands, or the mandated 
 territories under the League of Nations, where for- 
 eign Governments, through their military organiza- 
 tions, protect their nationals in an economic exploita- 
 tion of the native population, and themselves levy 
 taxes upon the natives to pay the costs of the pro- 
 cess. The nature and purpose of the State are clear, 
 indeed, in any community where the owning and 
 exploiting class exercises direct control over the 
 
224 Concerning Women 
 
 propertyless dependent classes as more or less chat- 
 tels. The landed aristocracy of Europe formerly 
 exercised this direct control, as their titles, now 
 grown meaningless, indicate. 
 
 But where the form of the State has undergone 
 a change which precludes this direct control by the 
 owning class, the nature of the, State, and its es- 
 sential function, are obscured. Under the republi- 
 canism which succeeded the American and French 
 revolutions, the expropriated classes have gained 
 freedom of movement, a limited freedom of opinion, 
 and a nominal share in the exercise of government. 
 The peasant is no longer bound to the soil he tills; 
 he may leave it at will to seek his fortune elsewhere 
 — on the terms of another landlord. The owning 
 classes no longer directly exercise government or 
 directly enjoy honours and titles by virtue of owner- 
 ship. The peoples of the Western world, at least 
 where parliamentarism has not broken down, have a 
 nominal freedom with little of the reality. Nomi- 
 nal freedom of movement is worth little to the man 
 who faces the alternative of being exploited where he 
 is, or being exploited elsewhere. Nominal freedom 
 of opinion is not extremely valuable when expres- 
 sion of opinion may cost one the opportunity to earn 
 
What Is To Be Done 225 
 
 one’s living; and the right to vote offers little satis- 
 faction when it means merely a right of choice be- 
 tween rival parties and candidates representing 
 exactly the same system of economic exploitation. 
 
 The political revolution which followed the break- 
 down of feudalism did the world its greatest service 
 in launching the idea of freedom; it did nothing — 
 or relatively very little — for its substance. Through 
 its agency the equal right of all human beings to 
 “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has come 
 to be granted in theory though not in fact; it re- 
 mained for the Russian Revolution to proclaim the 
 further idea that the basis of this right is not politi- 
 cal but economic. The political revolution did more ; 
 by establishing political democracy, it put into the 
 hands of the people the power to achieve eco- 
 nomic democracy by peaceful means. But by 
 that very act it obscured the essential function of the 
 State and the source of its power, which remained 
 clear as long as those who owned ruled directly by 
 virtue of ownership; and thus it hindered a clear 
 perception of the causal relation between privilege 
 and slavery. By abolishing hereditary power, it 
 effected a redistribution of privilege, and at the same 
 time forced privilege to exercise its control of gov- 
 
226 Concerning Women 
 
 ernment by indirect means. Privilege wds no longer 
 seated on the throne, but it remained, through its 
 control of economic opportunity, the power behind 
 the throne; 1 a power all the more difficult to dis- 
 lodge now that it exercised control without assuming 
 responsibility. Republicanism has proved the futil- 
 ity of dislodging a privileged class without abolish- 
 ing privilege; for this simply prepares the way for 
 the rise of a new privileged class which will use 
 government to enforce its exploitation of the prop- 
 ertyless class, in a different way, perhaps, but quite 
 as effectively as its predecessors. 
 
 The psychological effect of the political equality 
 established under republicanism is extremely de- 
 moralizing. As I have remarked, the subject classes 
 have never desired freedom so much as a chance at 
 the privileges that they see other people enjoy. 
 Political equality, with its breaking-down of class 
 distinctions, creates an impression of equality of 
 opportunity — and indeed to the extent that govern- 
 ment maintains no disabling legal discriminations 
 
 1 It is hardly necessary to go into the methods by which this 
 control is exercised. In a country where government is elected, as 
 in this, privilege controls through its contribution to party-funds, 
 through bribery, through economic pressure, and all the other means 
 which its control of economic opportunity puts at its disposal. 
 
What Is To Be Done 227 
 
 among members of the enfranchised class , 1 it ac- 
 tually establishes equality. No member of that class 
 is excluded from the benefits of privilege by any- 
 thing save his inability to get possession of it; and 
 this fact, especially in a country where opportunity 
 is comparatively plentiful, is more likely to confirm 
 people in their loyalty to a system under which they 
 stand even a dog’s chance to become beneficiaries 
 of privilege, than it is to stimulate an endeavour to 
 abolish privilege altogether. In this country the 
 incalculable richness of natural resources and the 
 enormous wealth to be gained by speculative enter- 
 prise under a government which gives full rein to 
 monopoly, contributed immensely to the corruption 
 of the citizenry. Speculation became the normal 
 course of enterprise, the most approved method of 
 money-getting; and the more ruinously did the 
 monopolist exploit the country’s resources, as Mr. 
 Veblen has pointed out, the greater the regard in 
 which he was held by his fellow citizens. Never 
 before in the world’s history had so many people a 
 chance at the enjoyment of privilege as in the pioneer 
 
 1 Women and slaves were discriminated against in this country ; 
 and in the State of California today, no person incapable of citizen- 
 ship may hold land — a provision which excludes Japanese and 
 Chinese. 
 
228 Concerning Women 
 
 period of American development. The country’s re- 
 sources were gutted for profit, not developed for use. 
 The use-value of land was incidental to its value as 
 real estate. Every farmer became a speculator, and 
 consequently the margin of cultivation, instead of 
 being pushed out gradually in response to the nat- 
 ural increase in the country’s needs, was extended 
 artificially and with extreme rapidity, with the result 
 that farms were miles apart and unnecessary dif- 
 ficulties in marketing, and in the maintenance of 
 education and social life, were created. The coun- 
 try resembled the modem city-addition of the real- 
 estater, with all the framework of settlement, wait- 
 ing for the pressure of population to enhance the 
 selling-price of land. Not only was the public mind 
 corrupted by the apparently limitless opportunity 
 to enjoy privilege — not only was speculation con- 
 fused with production — but all this opportunity was 
 blindly attributed to the blessings of republicanism. 
 “The greatest government on earth” came to be re- 
 garded as the guardian of free opportunity for all 
 citizens, in spite of the very evident fact that no gov- 
 ernment which protects land-monopoly can possibly 
 maintain freedom of opportunity, for in the course 
 of monopoly all available natural resources are 
 
What Is To Be Done 229 
 
 shortly pre-empted, and those people who are born 
 after occupation is complete will find nothing left to 
 pre-empt. Thus American patriotism took on a re- 
 ligious fervour, and the corruption of the populace 
 was complete. 
 
 The rise of industrialism has done as much as 
 anything else to engender misapprehension of the 
 State’s essential nature, its chief function, and the 
 source of its power. It is significant that the Phy- 
 siocrats lived and observed the workings of the State 
 before the industrial era, in an agricultural country, 
 where the relation between land-monopoly and gov- 
 ernment was direct and inescapable; and that Karl 
 Marx lived and wrote after the rise of the factory- 
 system, in a highly industrialized country. The 
 Physiocrats, for whom the basic economic problem 
 was unobscured, therefore attributed involuntary 
 poverty to its actual cause; while Marx, confusing 
 capital’s fortuitous advantage from monopoly with 
 monopoly itself, laid the responsibility at the door 
 of capitalism. To be sure, Marx recognized and 
 stated the fact that expropriation must precede ex- 
 ploitation; but he did not draw the obvious con- 
 clusion that the way to break capital’s power to ex- 
 ploit the worker is by simple reimpropriation. At 
 
230 Concerning Women 
 
 present there is a general impression that the factory- 
 system lured the population into the cities, and thus 
 caused the overcrowding that results in scarcity of 
 jobs and inadequacy of wage. As a matter of fact, 
 the factory-system found the cities already over- 
 crowded with exploitable labour. In England, for 
 example, the Enclosures Acts had deprived the peo- 
 ple of what common land remained to them, and had 
 driven them into the cities where they lived in incon- 
 ceivable filth and squalor, eking out a miserable 
 existence under the old family-system of industry. 
 The machine-system found all this expropriated and 
 exploitable human material ready to serve its ends 
 — far more, indeed, than it needed, as the riots 
 among the workers deprived of their livelihood by 
 its labour-saving tools, plainly indicated. The in- 
 dustrial revolution, then, did not produce the over- 
 crowding of the labour-market; but the capitalist of 
 the revolution profited by an overcrowding that al- 
 ready existed. He reaped indirectly the fruits of 
 monopoly. He profited likewise, and profits still, 
 by every labour-saving device, for it enabled him at 
 once to dispense with some labourers and, because 
 of the increase of unemployment thus caused, to 
 pay his remaining workers less. Capital was thus 
 
What 1 $ To Be Done 231 
 
 enabled to appropriate much more than its rightful 
 share of production, and hence to amass enormous 
 wealth, by means of which it influenced govern- 
 ment on behalf of its own further enrichment. In 
 this country, it has secured a system of protective 
 tariffs which amount to a governmental delegation 
 of taxing-power to the protected industries; it gives 
 them a monopoly of the home-market and enables 
 them to add to the price of their product the amount 
 of the tariff which has been set against the com- 
 peting foreign article. Capital has found other 
 ways of creating monopolies, such as the combina- 
 tions in restraint of trade at which the ineffectual 
 Sherman law was levelled. As the exactions of 
 monopoly increase, and the exploitation of labour 
 nears the point of diminishing return, the capitalist- 
 monopolist embarks, w T ith the protection of govern- 
 ment, on a policy of economic imperialism. He 
 monopolizes the markets of weak nations at the 
 point of his Government’s bayonets. He invests in 
 foreign enterprises which offer high returns for him- 
 self and risk of war for the Government which backs 
 him — that is to say, for the exploited masses at 
 home who must support the Government and fur- 
 nish its soldiers. In short, he constitutes himself a 
 
232 Concerning Women 
 
 menace to peace and prosperity both at home and 
 abroad ; so that it is not to be wondered at if people 
 observing his sinister activities, take capital to be the 
 cause of the economic injustice from which it derives 
 its power. Yet, if natural resources were put freely 
 in competition with industry for the employment of 
 labour, the inflamed fortunes of the capitalist class 
 would disappear. Monoply having been abol- 
 ished , 1 the capitalist-monopolist would no longer 
 exist, and the capitalist would no longer be in a 
 position to exact from production anything more 
 than his rightful interest — that is, as I have said, 
 the amount fixed by free competitive demand for the 
 use of his capital. 
 
 There is yet another cause of confusion in the 
 long-established custom of regarding land as private 
 property, whereas it is not, rightly speaking, private 
 property at all, but the source from which property 
 
 1 A great deal is said about credit-monopoly, as if it were some- 
 thing requiring a new and special kind of instrument to break up. 
 But what is credit? Merely a device for facilitating the exchange 
 of wealth, arid all wealth is produced from land. The break-up 
 of land-monopoly would therefore at once break up credit-monopoly. 
 Or, putting it in another way, the one and only imperishable secu- 
 rity is land — all other forms of security finally run back to it. The 
 break-up of land-monopoly would therefore break up the monopoly 
 of all the secondary and derived forms of security upon which credit 
 could be based. 
 
What Is To Be Done 233 
 
 is produced by the combined efforts of labour and 
 capital. The right to property in wealth which has 
 been produced, as, for instance, the coat on one’s 
 back, may be defended on the ground that it is the 
 product of one’s own labour, or has been acquired 
 through exchange of an equivalent amount of one’s 
 own product; but the right to property in land can 
 not be defended on the same ground, because land 
 is not a labour-product. The distinction is sim- 
 ply between labour-made property and law-made 
 property. Under our present system of tenure, to 
 be sure, the purchase price of land — that is, the in- 
 vestment of capital that the owner has made in 
 order to get title — may represent human labour — 
 but this is merely to say that the owner has invested 
 his capital in privilege, or law-made property; that 
 he has purchased, under governmental guarantee, a 
 certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely as the 
 investor in governmental securities purchases a 
 governmental guarantee that a certain share of fu- 
 ture labour-products will be taken from the pro- 
 ducers and turned over to him. The fact that, 
 under political government, capital may be invested, 
 in privilege in no wise alters the iniquitous nature of 
 privilege, and a sound public policy would disallow 
 
234 Concerning Women 
 
 an investor’s plea of good faith ex post facto . 1 Un- 
 der a system which did not permit such investments, 
 those people who wished to put their capital to gain- 
 ful use w T ould invest it in the only legitimate way, 
 which is in productive enterprise. 
 
 It is, perhaps, partly because of the confusion of 
 thought produced by all these causes, that no revolu- 
 tion has ever abolished the exploiting State and the 
 privileges that it exists to secure. But it must also 
 be remembered that all revolutions have risen out of 
 factional disputes or class-wars, and that in the lat- 
 ter case, the chief interest of the revolting class has 
 been not to abolish privilege but to redistribute it. 
 The French Revolution, for instance, expropriated 
 the land-owning nobility, but its politicians dared 
 not abolish private land-monopoly, for the bourge- 
 oisie which supported the revolution would not have 
 tolerated such an interference with their own en- 
 joyment of privilege. In one important respect the 
 Russian Revolution is an exception to this rule. It 
 is a class-revolution, but its avowed ultimate purpose 
 
 1 There is recent precedent for this in American law. Under the 
 XVIII Amendment and the Volstead Act, the Federal Government 
 confiscated ex post facto without a penny of compensation hundreds 
 of millions invested in the liquor business. All this, too, was in 
 labour-made property, not in law-made property, which greatly 
 strengthens the precedent. 
 
What Is To Be Done 235 
 
 is to abolish even that State-organization which it- 
 self at present maintains . 1 It is too early for any 
 forecast to be made concerning the outcome of this 
 attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the Russian 
 Revolution has already performed an inestimable 
 service to the world in proclaiming that the nature of 
 freedom is not political but economic, and in refus- 
 ing, as a State-organization, to use its power for the 
 maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living 
 by the exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of 
 influence abroad. 
 
 In order to abolish privilege it is not necessary, in 
 a political democracy, to wait for the economic 
 breakdown which its exactions inevitably bring 
 about — that is to say, it is not necessary to wait un- 
 til the number of wasteful idlers that production 
 must support shall become so numerous and so 
 wasteful that it can no longer meet their exactions. 
 The ballot has been a pretty ineffectual weapon in 
 the hands of the rank and file, but — so much must 
 be said for republicanism — it could be made ef- 
 fective. First, however, the rank and file would 
 
 1 The Constitution of one of the Soviet Republics — I think it is 
 Georgia — begins something after this fashion: “It is the purpose of 
 this Government to abolish government.” 
 
236 Concerning Women 
 
 have to learn what it is that this weapon should be 
 used against — it would have to become aware of the 
 nature of real freedom, and to wish real freedom to 
 prevail. The power of privilege under republican- 
 ism depends not only on its control of wealth, but 
 much more upon its control of thought and opinion. 
 That a campaign of education among the voters can 
 seriously endanger the position of privilege was 
 proved in England during the great land-values 
 campaign of 1914, which was cut short by the war. 
 But the task of education is not easy, because of the 
 conditions I have just been discussing, which obscure 
 the essential nature of privilege, and of the State. 
 We have had in this country a great deal of outcry 
 against privilege, and it has aroused considerable 
 popular sympathy; but the zeal engendered thereby 
 has not advanced the cause of freedom, because the 
 outcry was directed against the capitalist and the 
 exploiting power gained by his fortuitous advantage 
 from privilege, but not against privilege itself. The 
 nature of privilege was obscured. It is evidently 
 necessary, then, if the ballot is ever to be successfully 
 employed against privilege, to know what privilege 
 means and to clear away all confusion about it, 
 so that the voters may see what is at fault in our 
 
What Is To Be Done 237 
 
 economic system, and what remedial steps are neces- 
 sary. 
 
 The essential nature of freedom has been already 
 shown. It comes out in the abolition of monopoly, 
 primarily monopoly of natural resources, resulting 
 in complete freedom of the individual to apply his 
 productive labour where he will. It is freedom to 
 produce, and its corollary, freedom to exchange — 
 the laissez-faire, laissez-passer of the Physiocrats. 
 How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to 
 say. I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the 
 question as at present so important as that of estab- 
 lishing a clear understanding of the nature of free- 
 dom. When enough people come to see that the root 
 of all bondage, economic, political, social — even the 
 bondage of superstition and taboo — is expropriation, 
 reimpropriation will not be long in following; and 
 it may be achieved by a method quite different from 
 all those which theorists have thus far devised. 
 When people know what they need, they are usually 
 pretty resourceful about finding means to get it; and 
 so long as they do not know what they need, all the 
 means of securing it that can be suggested, however 
 excellent, must remain ineffective from the lack of 
 sufficient will to use them. 
 
23 § 
 
 Concerning Women 
 
 II 
 
 In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the 
 effect that freedom would have upon this or that 
 phase of human relations. There is really no field 
 of human activity that would not be profoundly af- 
 fected by it. A system of free economic opportu- 
 nity would exert upon the lives of human beings pre- 
 cisely as great an influence as that exerted by the 
 present economic system : that is to say, their mode 
 of life, their education, their quality of spirit, their 
 cast of thought, would all be determined by their 
 command of wealth, precisely as they now are. But 
 where the present economic system operates to place 
 the great mass of wealth at the command of a very 
 small percentage of the population and thus to keep 
 the majority in an involuntary and oppressive pov- 
 erty unfavourably affecting body, mind and spirit 
 in a thousand ways, a system of free opportunity 
 would place in the hands of every human being all 
 the wealth that his labour, freely employed, could 
 produce, and at the same time it would relieve pro- 
 ductive labour from the heavy burden of privilege. 
 Thus that huge share of wealth which now goes to 
 maintain the privileged classes in luxurious idleness, 
 
What Is To Be Done 239 
 
 and that further huge share which supports vast 
 bureaucracies and keeps up armies and navies to se- 
 cure the foreign investments of the privileged classes, 
 would be diverted to its proper use. The number of 
 workers would be augmented by all those privilegees 
 and placeholders who now live without producing ; 1 
 but opportunity would be increased in infinitely 
 greater proportion ; therefore these newcomers would 
 find no difficulty in supporting themselves. On the 
 other hand, the immense reduction in luxury and 
 waste thus brought about would very much shorten 
 the hours of labour. The worker whose labour, in 
 addition to maintaining himself and his dependents, 
 is supporting two or three idlers and paying for a 
 share of governmental waste besides, must neces- 
 sarily spend many more hours at work than the 
 worker whose exertions are required only for the sup- 
 port of himself and his natural dependents. But 
 while the labour of each producer would decrease, 
 production would be increased by the opening of new 
 opportunities, by the increase in number of the pro- 
 ducers, and by the enhanced power of consumption 
 
 1 The political placeholder must not be confused with those work- 
 ers in business, industry, or the arts who are not manual labourers, 
 but perform valid services which are exchangeable for wealth and 
 justify their being accounted productive workers. 
 
240 Concerning Women 
 
 made possible through their greater command of 
 wealth. The redistribution which would follow 
 upon the establishment of free opportunity, and the 
 curtailment of waste, would satisfy a share of this 
 new demand; but just as production and exchange, 
 in a period of comparative prosperity at present, are 
 stimulated by the increased consuming power of the 
 public, so, when artificial restrictions on production 
 had been removed, the increased power of consump- 
 tion which would result would act as a permanent 
 stimulus to production and exchange. 
 
 I will not speculate about the conditions arising 
 during the period of adjustment to the new condi- 
 tions of economic freedom. If bad, they would be 
 but temporary, and though they are often magnified 
 as arguments against freedom by those who either 
 can not or do not wish to see beyond them, they have 
 no proper place in this discussion, which is concerned 
 only with the permanent effect of free opportunity 
 on the lives, spirits and minds of human beings. 
 It may be doubted that the intercalary hardships of 
 the transition would be great; but if they were to be 
 twice as great as the most timorous would forecast 
 them, would they not be preferable to those attend- 
 ing the protraction of the present system to its in- 
 
What Is To Be Done 241 
 
 evitable break-up? That is the real question. 
 Thomas Jefferson said that rather than the French 
 Revolution should fail, he would see half Europe 
 perish, and “though but an Adam and Eve were left 
 in every country, and left free, it would be better 
 than it is now.” 
 
 Who can picture the profound alteration in the 
 attitude of people toward life and their fellow- 
 beings, if they were but emancipated from the fear 
 of want which now besets all of humankind? Even 
 the rich and the well-to-do are not exempt from this 
 fear; for an economic security based on an unsound 
 economic system is like those walks which are thrown 
 along the thin crust of earth among the geysers of 
 Yellowstone Park, where those who walk them are 
 in danger that a misstep may plunge them through 
 the thin crust to perish in the scalding heat beneath. 
 While an economic system based upon the legalized 
 robbery of one class by another remains in force, the 
 abyss of involuntary poverty will always yawn for 
 those who may lose their command of wealth 
 through their own incapacity for management, or 
 through circumstances beyond their control. It 
 seems likely that an instinctive sense of this is at 
 least partly responsible for the constant effort of peo- 
 
242 Concerning Women 
 
 pie already well off to increase their fortunes. It is 
 certainly responsible for a great deal of effort to get 
 wealth by dishonest means — that is to say, by those 
 forms of dishonesty which are without legal sanc- 
 tion. The fear of want produces avarice, chicanery, 
 fraud, servility, envy, suspicion, distrust. It leads 
 to unlegalized theft, to murder, to prostitution. It 
 produces a class of people who, in a society which 
 denies free opportunity and puts a premium on 
 graft, live by their wits, and in so doing often dis- 
 play an energy and ability which would be useful 
 to a society that offered it no opportunity save that 
 for honest and useful employment. Moreover, this 
 fear of want keeps the great majority of people con- 
 stantly occupied with the means of existence, when 
 they should properly be devoting a large share of 
 their time to the fulfilment of its purpose, which is 
 that enjoyment gained from developing one’s spirit- 
 ual capacities and pursuing spiritual interests. 
 Those thus preoccupied can not employ with either 
 imagination or profit what leisure they have. 
 Rather, they will merely use their leisure to overcome 
 their weariness of themselves. Their pleasures will 
 be mere pastimes, of the kind that subvert thought 
 and dull imagination. Thus little scope is left for 
 
What Is To Be Done 243 
 
 the higher activities of the spirit, and the quality of 
 life is impoverished. 
 
 The spiritual effects of the fear of want are natu- 
 rally most clearly observable in countries where it is 
 most widespread and deep-rooted. England offers 
 a particularly good field for observation of these phe- 
 nomena, for economic exploitation by a conquering 
 class which has merged into a powerful owning aris- 
 tocracy, is there advanced to the point of breakdown; 
 therefore all the results of economic exploitation are 
 present in overflowing measure. The most striking, 
 perhaps, are the servility and snobbery which find 
 sanction even in the Church catechism, in the pas- 
 sage admonishing candidates for confirmation to 
 order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their 
 betters — that is to say, those born to a higher place 
 in the social order. The English novelists, from the 
 days of Richardson and Fielding down to the pres- 
 ent, have faithfully recorded the unlovely char- 
 acteristics bred in a people by the ever-present neces- 
 sity of keeping an eye to the main chance; by the 
 knowledge that fortune may depend less on merit 
 and ability than on a servile currying of favour 
 with those powerful persons who, through the for- 
 tuitous circumstance of birth, are in control of eco- 
 
244 Concerning Women 
 
 nomic opportunity. Richardson was himself de- 
 moralized by the social system to which the economic 
 system had given rise. His acceptance of arrogance 
 in the owning class and abjectness in the exploited, 
 shows how acquiesence in injustice can corrupt even 
 a man of genius. “Pamela” is a veritable study in 
 servility; an unconscious and devastating exposition 
 of the basic principle of English society. Fielding, 
 on the other hand, was too critical to be corrupted 
 by it, and his books are all the more valuable for 
 the objectivity with which he presents the demorali- 
 zation that a predatory economic system has pro- 
 duced. What an array of characters he parades be- 
 fore his readers — avaricious, envious, suspicious, 
 self-seeking, arrogant, venal ! Even the hero of his 
 great novel, “Tom Jones,” is not above prostituting 
 himself to an elderly lady of wealth when he finds 
 himself in danger of want and with no more honest 
 means of getting a living, having been brought up 
 as a gentleman, that is to say, an idler. This great- 
 est of English novelists was well aware of the effect 
 produced on the collective life of his nation by an 
 arbitrary division of human kind into “High peo- 
 ple and Low people,” and he took occasion to com- 
 ment upon it with a penetrating satire. 
 
What Is To Be Done 245 
 
 Now the world being divided thus into people of 
 fashion and people of no fashion, a fierce contention 
 arose between them; nor would those of one party, to 
 avoid suspicion, be seen publicly to speak to those of 
 the other, tho’ they often held a very good correspond- 
 ence in private . . . but we who know them, must 
 have daily found very high persons know us in one 
 place and not in another, today and not tomorrow; . . . 
 and perhaps if the gods, according to the opinions of 
 some, made men only to laugh at them, there is no part 
 of our behavior which answers the end of our creation 
 better than this. 
 
 One might say that the profuseness of unamiable 
 qualities with which Fielding endows so many of 
 his characters, was due to a peculiar humour or pes- 
 simism in this writer, if one did not find those same 
 qualities plentifully distributed among the char- 
 acters of his successors. Dickens created a whole 
 gallery of highly interesting and unadmirable folk, 
 and one finds such faithful counterparts in Thack- 
 eray, for example, or in George Eliot, that they are 
 to be explained not as the mere creation of any 
 author’s imagination, but as a product of the society 
 in which he lived and observed. 
 
 There is material for an excellent study of the 
 
246 Concerning Women 
 
 relation of the economic and social system to the 
 literary art, in the important role that money plays 
 in English fiction. That intense preoccupation with 
 the means of existence which is enforced by the fear 
 of want, has profoundly affected the plots and char- 
 acters of English novels. The number of plots 
 which hinge on someone’s attempt to get someone 
 else’s money, is astonishing. The number of men 
 and women who either marry or attempt to marry 
 for money, is legion; and no English novelist has 
 the hardihood to settle his characters for life with- 
 out providing them with a living, generally through 
 inheritance or the generosity of some wealthy patron. 
 It is significant that if they are going to make their 
 own fortunes they usually strike out to make them 
 in the new world, where there is some opportunity. 
 The preoccupation with getting money, not through 
 industry but through inheritance, cadging, or chi- 
 canery, is reduced to its lowest terms in the stories 
 of W. W. Jacobs about life along the waterfront of 
 London. These entertaining and racy stories, with 
 monotonous regularity, present one theme, and that 
 theme is the attempt of one character to do another 
 — usually his closest associate — out of some trifling 
 sum of money. It is interesting to note that one 
 
What Is To Be Done 247 
 
 of the striking differences between English and 
 American fiction is that where the former deals with 
 money-getting the latter is likelier to deal with 
 money-making. The one represents a society where 
 opportunity is pretty thoroughly monopolized; the 
 other a society in which it is as yet somewhat 
 less so. 
 
 It is not the fear of want alone which demoralizes 
 and corrupts. In a society where the greatest re- 
 spect is paid to those who live in idleness through 
 legalized theft; where men of genius may be treated 
 like lackeys by those whose only claim to superior- 
 ity is their command of wealth ; where industry and 
 ability yield smaller returns than flattery and servil- 
 ity; in such a society there is little to encourage hon- 
 esty and independence of spirit. So long as honour 
 is paid to those who live by other people’s labour, 
 in proportion to their power of commanding it, so 
 long will praise of honesty, industry, and thrift 
 savour of hypocrisy, and so long will the mass of 
 people be under small temptation to cultivate these 
 virtues; and so long, also, will the moralists who 
 seek to inculcate them be open to the same sus- 
 picion of insincerity as are those bankers who stand 
 to profit substantially by the thrift they preach 
 
248 Concerning Women 
 
 among depositors. There is something grimly 
 amusing in the complaints so frequently heard from 
 those who live in ease, about the shiftlessness of the 
 working classes and their dishonest workmanship; 
 complaints which are well founded, perhaps, but do 
 not take into account the slight incentive that is fur- 
 nished by the knowledge that the profits of indus- 
 try and honest workmanship will be diverted into 
 other pockets than those of the workers. If labour 
 takes every opportunity of giving as little as it can 
 for as much as it can get, one must remember that it 
 but follows the example set by the owning classes, 
 an example that has yielded them rich returns both 
 in wealth and in the esteem of their fellow-men. 
 Under a free economic system no such demoraliz- 
 ing example would exist. The material rewards of 
 honesty, industry, and thrift would accrue to those 
 who practised these virtues; and since there would 
 be no opportunity to gain esteem through the ap- 
 propriation of other people’s labour, those who 
 wished to enjoy it would be forced to depend on more 
 worthy means, such as ability, integrity, and up- 
 rightness in their dealings with other people. 
 
 In a free society, ignorance, vice and crime would 
 tend to disappear. We should have no people in 
 
What Is To Be Done 249 
 
 high places whose large-scale theft would make them 
 fitter inmates for jails, and no people in jails for 
 those petty thefts to which need is a perennial in- 
 centive. Jails, indeed, would be very little needed 
 by such a society; for what with the abolition of the 
 State, with its long list of law-made crimes, and the 
 disappearance of those social conditions which are 
 largely responsible for the few infractions of moral 
 law which constitute real crime, there would be very 
 few offenders to occupy them. I have already re- 
 marked that need is a constant incentive to theft; 
 it is also the chief cause of ignorance; and ignorance 
 and misery are fecund sources of vice, as well as of 
 the physical and mental degeneracy which result in 
 imbecility and idiocy. If need were removed, if 
 every human being were assured from birth of phys- 
 ical well-being and ample opportunity to develop 
 mentally to the full extent of his capacity, these 
 distressing results of involuntary poverty would not 
 long exist to menace the peace and health of com- 
 munities and fill reformers and eugenists with 
 alarm. The cities where human beings are crowded 
 together under conditions subversive of health and 
 decency would be gradually emptied of their sur- 
 plus population. At present they are largely asy- 
 
250 Concerning Women 
 
 lums for the expropriated, but when land was once 
 more freely available they would resume their nat- 
 ural character as centres of industry and exchange. 
 There would be no more centres of want, misery and 
 vice, like centres of infection, to menace the health 
 and well-being of society. Man, reclaimed by the 
 land which is his natural home, would appear for 
 what he really is, a child of the earth, rather than 
 an industrial machine far removed from his right- 
 ful heritage of close, health-giving connexion with 
 the soil from which his sustenance comes. Life, in 
 short, having been placed on its natural basis, might 
 be expected to proceed along natural lines of de- 
 velopment. Mankind, assured of physical health, 
 would progress steadily in health of mind and activ- 
 ity of spirit; and being freed from its pressing need 
 to take thought of the morrow, it would have leisure 
 to seek the kingdom of heaven — not that heaven 
 which the church promises as a future reward for 
 orthodox communicants, but the kingdom of 
 heaven which “is within you,” the happiness that 
 comes from the harmonious development of the high- 
 est faculties of body, mind and spirit, and their use 
 in the promotion of a beautiful individual and col- 
 lective life. Superstition and intolerance would 
 
What Is To Be Done 251 
 
 disappear with the ignorance that produces them. 
 Thought would no longer be hampered either by fear 
 or the consciousness of dependence on an order of 
 things unfit to bear the light of reason; but every 
 human being would be free to exercise that inde- 
 pendence of mind that only the most courageous or 
 the most securely placed may allow themselves at 
 present. The long story of martyrdom for opinion 
 would come to an end when freedom of opinion no 
 longer threatened a vested interest in the perpetua- 
 tion of injustice. Thus that “progressive humani- 
 zation of man in society” which is civilization in the 
 highest sense, would be in a way to be promoted as 
 it has never been promoted in any society of which 
 the world has knowledge. 
 
 hi 
 
 Theoretically, it might still be possible for free 
 economic opportunity and its benefits to exist for 
 men only or for women only; but in order to exclude 
 a whole sex from participation in them, it would be 
 necessary to reduce its members to the status of chat- 
 tels. Now, to reduce half of humanity to slavery is 
 practically unthinkable; it would necessitate a re- 
 
252 Concerning Women 
 
 version to an order of thought that has largely been 
 outgrown; for all social injustice, in the last analy- 
 sis, is founded in an ignorance and prejudice which 
 cause even its victims to acquiesce in it. Indeed, 
 without this acquiescence, social injustice may be 
 called impossible. “ After the primary necessities 
 of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strong- 
 est want of human nature.” Because of this in- 
 stinct for freedom, the subjection of any class in so- 
 ciety can be continued only so long as that class itself 
 fails clearly to realize the injustice of its position; 
 when it comes into a clear realization of this injus- 
 tice it will demand and eventually obtain the re- 
 moval of its disabilities. The subjection of women, 
 such as it has been, lasted only so long as women 
 themselves acquiesced in it . 1 When they developed 
 a sense of injury, they began to demand the equality 
 with men which is their right, and ignorance, prej- 
 udice and superstition are yielding before the de- 
 
 1 This is not to be taken as a contradiction of what I have said 
 in Chapter I concerning the argument that women wanted to be 
 subjected. No class ever voluntarily accepts subjection; but when 
 it has been subjected by one means or another, the ignorance that 
 its subjection breeds may cause it to become passively acquiescent 
 in the injustice of its position. It is worth noting that so long as 
 the idea of slavery is tolerated, slaves may accept their position with 
 a certain fatalism, much as the vanquished force in war accepts its 
 defeat. 
 
What Is To Be Done 253 
 
 mand. There is no reason to suppose that women, 
 having progressed thus far, would tolerate without 
 a sharp struggle any reversion to the injustice from 
 which they have escaped. Ignorance, prejudice, 
 and superstition, moreover, are incompatible with 
 the enlightenment which will be necessary in order 
 to secure economic justice even for one-half of hu- 
 manity; for that enlightenment postulates not only 
 the desire to enjoy freedom oneself, but the desire 
 that all people may enjoy it — that is, it postulates 
 repudiation of the idea of dominance. Thus society 
 not only could not endure half slave, half free; it 
 would not wish so to endure. 
 
 Women are at present under certain disabilities 
 which legal equality with men can hardly be ex- 
 pected to remove. Those disabilities are: 
 
 1. Economic: Women are the victims of unjust 
 discriminations in industry and the professions in 
 regard to training, opportunities, tenure of employ- 
 ment, and wages. They are also victimized by ill- 
 considered “welfare” legislation sponsored by be- 
 nevolent persons, and by male workers whose pur- 
 pose is to rid themselves of unwelcome competition. 1 
 
 1 It is not to be understood that all male workers, individually or 
 in union, take this attitude ; but that it does exist among them I 
 have already shown. 
 
254 Concerning Women 
 
 If legal equality of the sexes were established, 
 women might be able, under the law, to force public 
 industrial schools to give them equal opportunities 
 for training; they might also be able to enforce a 
 demand for equal pay with men for equal work. 
 It is even conceivable that they might force employ- 
 ers to lay off workers, during periods of depression, 
 on a proportional basis — men and women together, 
 in proportion to the number of each sex employed. 
 All this, however, would entail unremitting vigi- 
 lance, and great effort in getting legal enactments; 
 it would also entail a great deal of governmental 
 machinery, with all the waste and ineffectiveness im- 
 plied by the term; and it would leave the general 
 labour-problem precisely where it is at present. As 
 for the matter of opportunity, so long as industry is 
 in the hands of private concerns, I see no way by 
 which employers can be forced under an equal-rights 
 law to employ women where they prefer to employ 
 men. Nor is there any certainty that legal equal- 
 ity will save working women from having the race 
 “safeguarded” at their expense. But if land were 
 put freely in competition with industry for the em- 
 ployment of labour, all these disabilities would dis- 
 
What Is To Be Done 255 
 
 appear. Women would enjoy the same freedom as 
 men to get their living by their labour, and since 
 there would be no such thing as a labour-surplus, 
 their wage, like that of men, would be the full prod- 
 uct of their labour, and not that share which em- 
 ployers or governmental boards thought fit to grant 
 them. There would be no need for reformers or 
 other benevolent persons to secure them fair hours 
 and conditions of labour, or to get them excluded 
 from hazardous employments; for there is no way 
 to make a worker accept onerous conditions of labour 
 from an employer if he have an ever-present alter- 
 native of going out and creating more agreeable con- 
 ditions by working for himself. The worker whose 
 independent position makes it possible to refuse to 
 work an excessive number of hours or under un- 
 healthful or dangerous or disagreeable conditions, 
 will simply refuse, and there will be an end of it. 
 Thus employers, instead of being prevented from ex- 
 ploiting women beyond a certain point, would be 
 rendered incapable of exploiting anyone in any de- 
 gree. Nor would male workers longer have any in- 
 centive to avail themselves of “protective” legisla- 
 tion in order to reduce the competition of women 
 
256 Concerning Women 
 
 with men in the labour-market; for it is only where 
 opportunity is artificially restricted that there are 
 “not enough jobs to go around.” 
 
 Certain direct consequences of the economic in- 
 feriority of women might be expected to disappear 
 when that inferiority no longer existed. Foremost 
 among these is the demoralizing temptation to get 
 their living by their sex. Prostitution would dis- 
 appear from a society which offered women ample 
 opportunity to earn their living without doing vio- 
 lence to their selective sexual disposition. Marriage 
 would no longer be degraded to the level of a means 
 of livelihood, as it is today for a great many women; 
 for economic security would no longer in any wise 
 depend upon it. This being the case, the expecta- 
 tion now put upon women to undertake marriage 
 as a profession would disappear, and marriage 
 would come to be regarded in the light of a condition, 
 freely and voluntarily assumed by both sexes, who 
 would jointly and equally undertake its responsibili- 
 ties. Under such circumstances, one might con- 
 fidently expect a further modification of institu- 
 tionalized marriage which would remove all those 
 privileges and disabilities now legally enforced on 
 either party by virtue of the contract. The idea that 
 
What Is To Be Done 257 
 
 woman’s place is the home — which implies that mar- 
 riage, for her, necessarily involves acquiescence in a 
 traditional sexual division of labour and a tradi- 
 tional mode of life — with all its disabling economic 
 and psychological consequences, would disappear 
 from a society in which she was able freely to choose 
 her occupation according to her abilities. Thus, 
 from the status of a class regarded as being divinely 
 ordained to be the world’s housekeepers, women 
 would emerge into the status of human beings, free 
 to consult their interests and inclinations in the 
 ordering of their lives, without regard to traditional 
 expectations which, being no longer enforced by 
 economic or legal sanctions, would have no longer 
 any power over them. 
 
 2. Psychological: Those prejudices and super- 
 stitions which now hamper women in their develop- 
 ment and in the ordering of their lives, might be ex- 
 pected to disappear from a free society. In so far 
 at they are the consequences of woman’s subjection, 
 they would yield before her emergence into the status 
 of a human being, sharing equally with man in the 
 freedom of opportunity that would result from the 
 establishment of economic justice, and the increased 
 cultural advantages that freedom of opportunity 
 
258 Concerning Women 
 
 would bring. In so far as they are the outgrowth of 
 primitive ignorance and superstition, they would 
 yield before the increased intelligence and enlighten- 
 ment which might be expected to result from the 
 abundance and leisure afforded to every human be- 
 ing by economic freedom. Thus those artificial dif- 
 ferentiations between the sexes which have been built 
 up by fear, by superstitions, and by masculine 
 dominance, would tend to disappear. Women 
 w T ould no longer be regarded as extra-human beings 
 endowed with superhuman powers for good or ill; 
 they would no longer be regarded exclusively or 
 chiefly as a function, being no longer forced to oc- 
 cupy that status ; theories of their mental and spirit- 
 ual inferiority based on the results of centuries of 
 subjection would yield before a more humane and 
 scientific attitude; and as freedom promoted individ- 
 uation among women, it would become evident that 
 the traditional notions concerning the feminine na- 
 ture were drawn from qualities which, having been 
 bred by their subjection, should have been regarded 
 as characteristics not of a sex but of a class. 
 
 3. Social: The superstitious notion that wo- 
 man’s honour is a matter of sex would disappear 
 with the masculine dominance from which it re- 
 
What Is To Be Done 259 
 
 suited. When women need no longer depend on 
 marriage for their living or their social position, they 
 will no longer be under any great compulsion to 
 make their sexual relations conform to standards 
 which have been adapted to suit the interests, de- 
 sires and tastes of men. Being economically inde- 
 pendent of men, they will be at liberty to consult their 
 own interests, desires and tastes, in this as in other 
 matters. They may desire to preserve those habits of 
 virginity before marriage and chastity after it, which 
 have been imposed upon them under masculine domi- 
 nance; but they will be under no external compulsion 
 to do so. When they have no longer a professional 
 interest in conforming to the conventional moral 
 code, their sexual relations will cease to be regarded 
 as falling within the purview of morality at all; 
 rather they will be, as those of men have been, a 
 question of manners. For when a moral precept 
 no longer has social or economic sanctions to en- 
 force it, its observance ceases to be a matter of 
 worldly interest or expediency, and becomes a matter 
 of personal taste. Then, if it be not sound, it will 
 be repudiated; if it be sound, the individual who 
 allows himself to be guided by it will profit spirit- 
 ually by doing so, because his obedience will respond 
 
260 Concerning Women 
 
 to his own instinct for what is good, rather than to 
 an external pressure. 
 
 The spiritual gain that will come through the re- 
 lease from bondage to superstition, discrimination 
 and taboo, is incalculable. Freed from her slavery 
 to catchwords, woman will be able to discover and 
 appraise for herself the true spiritual values which 
 catchwords usually obscure. Having no longer any 
 need to preserve a fearful regard for what other peo- 
 ple may think of her, she will be at liberty to regu- 
 late her conduct by what she wishes to think of her- 
 self; and hence she will be able to cast aside the 
 hypocrisy, duplicity and dissimulation that must be 
 bred in any class of people whose position in society 
 depends not upon what they are but upon what they 
 appear to be. Having attained to the full human- 
 ity which this emancipation implies, she will gain 
 sufficient respect for her sex to tolerate no discrimi- 
 nations against it. Thus we may expect to see her 
 sexual function of motherhood placed on a basis 
 of self-respect, and the barbarous injustice of illegit- 
 imacy relegated to the limbo of forgotten abuses. 
 Woman will for the first time undergo the profound 
 and weighty experience of responsibility to herself, 
 rather than to social institutions and arrangements 
 
What Is To Be Done 
 
 261 
 
 which were made for her, and whose nature is not 
 such as to command the deference of a free agent. 
 Free from the tyranny of the expected, from the dis- 
 abling consequences of surveillance and repression, 
 women will for the first time be able to develop to 
 their full stature as human beings, in accordance 
 with the law of spiritual growth which has so long 
 been thwarted and perverted by the usages of society. 
 
 I have given only a general idea of what economic 
 freedom would do to promote human happiness. 
 Its effect upon the lives and characters of men would 
 be quite as emancipating as upon those of women; 
 but this I have not space to consider in detail. In 
 passing, however, I might remark that not the least 
 of the benefits that men would gain by it would be 
 relief from the worry and humiliation which the sup- 
 port of women so often involves at present. “I have 
 taken mistreatment from that conductor,” said a 
 young musician recently, “that I never would have 
 stood for if I were single. But I have a wife, and 
 that makes us all cowards.” A free people would 
 outgrow on the one hand the sheepishness that 
 fear of want begets, and on the other the arrogance 
 bred by consciousness of power. Men would no 
 longer need endure humiliation for the sake of keep- 
 
262 Concerning Women 
 
 ing their jobs; and those over them would be es- 
 topped from arrogance by the knowledge that they 
 were dealing with free men who were under no com- 
 pulsion to tolerate it. 
 
 If it appear that I envisage utopian results from 
 the institution of economic freedom, let me assume 
 the possibility that those spiritual results which I 
 foresee might not come about. If they did not come 
 about, however, their failure to do so would imply 
 a profound and inexplicable change for the worse 
 in human nature; for if the world’s history proves 
 anything, it is that there is in mankind a natural 
 disposition to aspire toward what is ennobling and 
 beautiful, and that this disposition is favoured by 
 economic security — especially where it is not as- 
 sociated with irresponsible power — and thwarted by 
 involuntary poverty. Why is it that the middle 
 classes are regarded as the “backbone” of society, if 
 hot because they have had enough command of 
 wealth to enable the maintenance of health and a 
 high standard of education, without that excess and 
 power which too often breed idleness and arrogance ? 
 Leisure and abundance stimulate independence of 
 spirit, thought, education, creative activity. Penury 
 leads to demoralization, ignorance, dulness. This 
 
What Is To Be Done 263 
 
 has been the world’s experience in the past. “There 
 is in man,” says Goethe, “a creative disposition 
 which comes into activity as soon as his existence is 
 assured. As soon as he has nothing to worry about 
 or to fear, this semi-divinity in him, working effec- 
 tively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps 
 materials into which to breathe its own spirit.” 
 Why should one assume that this spirit will pass 
 over the material offered by life itself and the re- 
 lations of human beings with one another? It has 
 not done so in the past. Throughout mankind’s 
 .long martyrdom of exploitation, through all the 
 struggling and hatred engendered thereby, this semi- 
 divinity in man has been leading him towards a 
 more; humane conception olf life. The spiritual 
 peace and assurance resulting from economic justice 
 would set all human beings free not only to share 
 in this conception but to realize it — to establish upon 
 earth that ideal life of man which, in the words of 
 George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he 
 shall one day come to know it.” 
 
 IV 
 
 The whole point of the foregoing, for present pur- 
 poses, is this: It is impossible for a sex or a class 
 
264 Concerning Women 
 
 to have economic freedom until everybody has it, 
 and until economic freedom is attained for every- 
 body, there can be no real freedom for anybody. 
 Without economic freedom, efforts after political and 
 social freedom are nugatory and illusive, except for 
 what educational value they may have for those con- 
 cerned with them. The women of the United States, 
 having now got about all that is to be had out of 
 these efforts — enough at any rate, to raise an un- 
 easy suspicion that their ends are lamentably far 
 from final — are in a peculiarly good position to dis- 
 cern the nature of real freedom, to see which way it 
 lies, and to feel an ardent interest in what it can do 
 for them. My purpose, then, is not deliberately to 
 discourage their prosecution of any enfranchising 
 measures that may lie in their way to promote, and 
 still less to disparage the successes that they have 
 already attained. It is rather to invite them 
 thoughtfully to take stock of what they have really 
 got by these successes, to consider whether it is all 
 they want, and to settle with themselves whether their 
 collective experience on the way up from the status 
 of a subject sex does not point them to a higher ideal 
 of freedom than any they have hitherto entertained. 
 
What Is To Be Done 265 
 
 In the past century, women have gained a great 
 deal in the way of educational, social and political 
 rights. They have gained a fair degree of economic 
 independence. They are no longer obliged to “keep 
 silence in the churches,” as they still were at the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century; indeed, certain 
 sects have even admitted them to the ministry. The 
 women who now enjoy this comparative freedom, 
 and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are 
 indebted to a long line of women who carried on 
 the struggle — sometimes lonely and discouraging — 
 against political, legal, social and industrial discrim- 
 ination, and to the men, as well, who aided and 
 encouraged them. Thanks to the efforts of these 
 pioneers, the women of today have a new tradition 
 to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those 
 which women were expected to observe in the past: 
 the tradition of active demand for the establishment 
 of freedom. They will be none the less under ob- 
 ligation to continue this demand when the freedom 
 that shall remain to be secured is of a kind not en- 
 visaged by their predecessors. Rather, in the meas- 
 ure that they proceed beyond those ends that seemed 
 ultimate to their predecessors, they will prove that 
 
266 Concerning Women 
 
 these built well; for the best earnest of advance- 
 ment is the attainment of an ever new and wider 
 vision of progress. 
 
 The organized feminist movement in England 
 and America has concerned itself pretty exclusively 
 with securing political rights for women; that is to 
 say, its conception of freedom has been based on the 
 eighteenth century misconception of it as a matter of 
 suffrage. Women have won the vote, and now they 
 are proceeding to use their new political power to 
 secure the removal of tiiose legal discriminations 
 which still remain in force against their sex. This 
 is well enough; it is important that the State should 
 be forced to renounce its pretension to discriminate 
 against women in favour of men. But even if we 
 assume that the establishment of legal equality be- 
 tween the sexes would result in complete social and 
 economic equality, we are obliged to face the fact 
 that under such a regime women would enjoy pre- 
 cisely that degree of freedom which men now enjoy — 
 that is to say, very little. I have remarked that those 
 who control men’s and women’s economic opportu- 
 nity control men and women. The State represents 
 the organized interest of those who control economic 
 opportunity; and while the State continues to exist, 
 
What Is To Be Done 267 
 
 it may be forced to renounce all legal discrimina- 
 tions against one sex in favour of the other without 
 in any wise affecting its fundamental discrimina- 
 tion against the propertyless, dependent class — 
 which is made up of both men and women — in fa- 
 vour of the owning and exploiting classes. Until 
 this fundamental discrimination is challenged, the 
 State may, without danger to itself, grant, in prin- 
 ciple at least, the claims to political and legal equal- 
 ity of all classes under its power. The emancipa- 
 tion of negroes within the political State has not 
 notably improved their condition; for they are still 
 subject to an economic exploitation which is en- 
 hanced by race-prejudice and the humiliating tradi- 
 tion of slavery. The emancipation of women 
 within the political State will leave them subject, 
 like the negro, to an exploitation enhanced by sur- 
 viving prejudices against them. The most that can 
 be expected of the removal of discriminations sub- 
 jecting one class to another within the exploiting 
 State, is that it will free the subject class from dual 
 control — control by the favoured class and by the 
 monopolist of economic opportunity. 
 
 Even this degree of emancipation is worth a good 
 deal; and therefore one is bound to regret that it 
 
268 Concerning Women 
 
 has no guarantee of permanence more secure than 
 legal enactment. Rights that depend on the suffer- 
 ance of the State are of uncertain tenure; for they 
 are in constant danger of abrogation either through 
 the failure of the State to maintain them, through a 
 gradual modification of the laws on which they de- 
 pend, or through a change in the form of the State . 1 
 At the present moment the third of these dangers, 
 which might have seemed remote ten years ago, may 
 be held to be at least equally pressing with the other 
 two. It is a misfortune of the woman’s movement 
 that it has succeeded in securing political rights for 
 women at the very period when political rights are 
 worth less than they have been at any time since the 
 eighteenth century. Parliamentary government is 
 breaking down in Europe, and the guarantees of in- 
 dividual rights which it supported are disappearing 
 with it. Republicanism in this country has not yet 
 broken down, but public confidence in it has never 
 been so low, and it seems certainly on the way to dis- 
 
 1 This is not to be taken as contradicting the earlier statement that 
 women would not renounce without a struggle the rights they 
 have gained. The world can not move toward freedom without 
 carrying women along; they would not tolerate a dual movement, 
 towards freedom for men and slavery for themselves. But when 
 the general movement is away from freedom, as the movement of 
 political government is at present, the rights of women are en- 
 dangered along with those of men. 
 
What Is To Be Done 269 
 
 aster. No system of government can hope long to 
 survive the cynical disregard of both law and prin- 
 ciple which government in America regularly ex- 
 hibits. Under these circumstances, no legal guar- 
 antee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, 
 and the women who rely upon such guarantees to 
 protect them against prejudice and discrimination 
 are leaning on a broken reed. They will do well to 
 bear this in mind as they proceed with their demands 
 for equality, and to remember that however great 
 may be their immediate returns from the removal of 
 their legal disabilities, they can hardly hope for 
 security against prejudice and discrimination until 
 their natural rights, not as women but as human 
 beings, are finally established. This is to say that 
 if they wish to be really free they must school them- 
 selves in “the magnificent tradition of economic free- 
 dom, the instinct to know that without economic free- 
 dom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and 
 that if economic freedom be attained, no other free- 
 dom can be withheld.” 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SIGNS OF PROMISE 
 
 Superficially it may seem that the present is 
 an inappropriate time to suggest that either women 
 or men go deliberately out of their way to undertake 
 a process of self-education in the meaning of free- 
 dom. The dominant spirit among us is not only 
 not hospitable to the idea of freedom; it is openly 
 inimical to the idea. The United States is the rich- 
 est and most powerful country in the world. It is in 
 the midst of the most interesting experiment ever 
 seen in the simplification of human life. It is un- 
 dertaking to prove that human beings can live a 
 generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the 
 reflective intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and 
 in a proper use of the word without emotions, so 
 long as they may see the prospect of a moderate well- 
 being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under 
 the spell of a great number of mechanical devices 
 for the enhancement of comfort, convenience and 
 
 pleasure. This experiment is so universal and so 
 
 270 
 
Signs of Promise 271 
 
 preoccupying that while it is going on there would 
 seem to be no chance to get any consideration for 
 so unrelated a matter as freedon. Hence the only 
 current notion of freedom is freedom to live and be- 
 have as the majority live and behave and to desire 
 what the majority desire; and notions which diverge 
 from this have not been under stronger suspicion and 
 disapproval since the eighteenth century than they 
 are in this country today. Not that any one, prob- 
 ably, fears any degree of liberty for himself, but 
 every one has a nervous horror of too much liberty 
 for others. Most people no doubt feel that they 
 themselves would know exactly what to do with free- 
 dom and therefore might be safely trusted with any 
 measure of it; it is the possible social effect of other 
 people’s liberty that they dread. No idea, probably, 
 is more distrusted and feared among us at the pres- 
 ent time than that of freedom for someone else. 
 
 The dominant spirit at present — the spirit which 
 gives tone to our society — is diametrically opposed 
 to the spirit of freedom. It is a spirit of coercion 
 and intolerance. Politically this spirit finds expres- 
 sion in a pronounced reaction from the “progressiv- 
 ism” which had gained so much support before the 
 war; in an enormous strengthening of “the cohesive 
 
272 Concerning Women 
 
 power of public plunder,” with a consequent rever- 
 sion to the regimentation of strict party-government ; 
 in outrages committed by government, with popular 
 approval — or at least indifference — upon the per- 
 sons and property of people suspected of economic 
 unorthodoxy; and in a cynical disregard by both 
 government and populace of those guarantees of in- 
 dividual liberty which were wrested from govern- 
 ment by more liberty-loving generations than our 
 own. It is evident also in the development of extra- 
 governmental organizations committed to a pro- 
 gramme of violence actuated by religious bigotry, 
 race-hatred, or inflamed chauvinism, such as the 
 Hackenkreutzers and F ascists abroad — for the spirit 
 of intolerance is not confined to the United States — 
 and the Ku Klux Klan in this country; movements 
 which, although they imply no menace to the ex- 
 ploiting classes themselves, do constitute a menace, 
 at present imperfectly perceived, to the established 
 organization through which those classes exercise 
 exploitation, and an extremely threatening danger 
 to the lives and liberties of millions among the 
 governed. 
 
 Economically the spirit of coercion is in evidence 
 in the struggles for advantage between capital and 
 
Signs of Promise 273 
 
 labour, each trying to force the other to its own 
 terms; in attempts by employers to break up defen- 
 sive organization among their workers; and in such 
 laws as the Criminal Syndicalism Acts, most of 
 which give criminal character to membership in an 
 organization professing radical economic doctrine. 
 Socially it is reflected in such laws as the Eighteenth 
 Amendment and the Volstead Act, and in puerile 
 and evil-minded attempts at censorship of individual 
 conduct, of public amusement, and of literature and 
 art. In religion it is manifest in the activities of the 
 Ku Klux Klan, in the current controversy between 
 Fundamentalism and Modernism in the Protestant 
 churches, and in the attempt sponsored by bigoted 
 and influential church-organizations to stop by edict 
 the progress of biological and anthropological sci- 
 ence, because it threatens the tenure of established 
 superstitions. It is likewise evident in the concern 
 of those organizations with such social behaviour of 
 individuals as must rationally be held indifferent, 
 and their efforts to get their particular code of con- 
 duct enforced through sumptuary law. 
 
 The recrudescence of this spirit is the immediate 
 result of war, which always brings it about. War 
 embodies in its crudest form the doctrine of govern- 
 
274 Concerning Women 
 
 ment by violence; and when war is dominant, 
 therefore, the ideals of justice and liberty, which are 
 directly opposed to it, become so unpopular that 
 those who continue to profess them are liable to 
 persecution by government and by their war-mad 
 compatriots. Governments, which never grant their 
 citizens more freedom of opinion and action than is 
 absolutely necessary in order to get themselves tol- 
 erated, take advantage of this war-spirit to revoke, in 
 practice if not in law, those guarantees of individual 
 rights which it suits their purpose to dispense with. 
 When the popular orgy of patriotic bloodthirst and 
 intolerance is over, and the populace begins to get 
 back to sanity, it finds government more securely 
 fixed upon its back than ever, and prepared to ride 
 it without that easy rein and that sparing of the 
 spur which fear compels. Thus it is that the Gov- 
 ernments of the Western world, since the war, have 
 been carrying on their imperialist activities abroad 
 and persecuting dissenters at home, with an excess 
 of cynicism which would have been effectively repre- 
 hended by public opinion before the war. 
 
 The chief reason why this policy of force con- 
 tinues to command a large measure of popular sup- 
 port is because fear of bolshevism has taken the 
 
Signs of Promise 275 
 
 place of that fear of the enemy which unifies public 
 opinion behind Governments in war-time. Eco- 
 nomic interests immediately consolidated against the 
 influence of the Russian Revolution precisely as they 
 did against that of the French Revolution, and in 
 the same way. Governments have done all in their 
 power to inculcate fear of this influence upon their 
 peoples ; and in this they command the assistance of 
 practically the whole institutional organization of 
 their respective countries. There is other and far 
 better reason for this propaganda than the mere need 
 of a new bogey with which to cow the timorous and 
 keep the disaffected under control. The idea of 
 freedom which bolshevist Russia has launched is a 
 distinct menace to political government and its bene- 
 ficiaries, the owning classes. If the expropriated 
 and exploited masses in other countries once get it 
 through their heads that their primary interest is 
 not political but economic, the days of political gov- 
 ernment will be numbered. The propaganda 
 against bolshevism is therefore inspired by two mo- 
 tives: the wish to frighten peoples into approving 
 suppression of those suspected of political and 
 economic heresy, and the wish to divert attention 
 from the idea behind the Russian Revolution 
 
276 Concerning Women 
 
 through the moral effect of real or supposititious 
 misbehaviour by the Revolutionary Government. 
 It is a curious twist of human psychology that makes 
 supposed outrages committed by a foreign Govern- 
 ment five thousand miles away appear to justify ac- 
 tual and equal outrages by one’s own Government 
 in one’s owq country; and a proletarian dictatorship 
 five thousand miles away appear to justify a dic- 
 tatorship of the exploiting classes at home. The 
 Soviet Government’s alleged mistreatment of politi- 
 cal dissenters is easily made effective in ranging 
 popular opinion in this country behind governmental 
 persecution and deportation of communists and an- 
 archists. Reports of Red terror in Russia reconcile 
 public opinion — or at least that portion of it which 
 is articulate- — to the reign of a White terror here. 
 It would appear that the desirability of dictatorship 
 and terrorism is not in question, but their colour. 
 Civilized persons, perhaps, would find little to 
 chose between Red terror and White terror, or a 
 Red dictatorship and a White ; they would probably 
 elect to dispense with terrorism and dictatorship alto- 
 gether; but civilized persons have nothing to do 
 with framing the policies of government, and al- 
 
Signs of Promise 277 
 
 most nothing to do with the formation of majority- 
 opinion. 
 
 Superficially, then, an invitation to contemplate 
 freedom seems untimely. The cause of freedom is 
 neither popular nor fashionable; therefore it may 
 seem unduly optimistic to expect that there will soon 
 be an interest in it deep enough or general enough to 
 move many people to inquire seriously into its mean- 
 ing or its desirability. Such a study would imply a 
 critical reappraisal of institutions to which fear of 
 change impels the majority to cling with a tenacity 
 out of proportion to the benefits to be derived from 
 their preservation. In this country this fear of 
 change is especially strong because, as I have re- 
 marked before, the exactions of monopoly have not 
 yet advanced to the point of choking industry. 
 Moreover, opportunities to enjoy monopoly are not 
 as extensively pre-empted here as they are elsewhere ; 
 and therefore the chances of the individual to share 
 in the loot of industry are much better. This fact 
 tends to keep a great many people loyal to an eco- 
 nomic and political order which offers them a 
 chance, however remote, to live by the earnings of 
 other people, and to make them inhospitable to an 
 
278 Concerning Women 
 
 idea of freedom which threatens that chance. 
 There is another factor, too, which must be taken 
 into account, as explaining the hostility of our prole- 
 tariat towards an experiment in proletarian govern- 
 ment which might be expected to gain their tolerance 
 if not their sympathetic interest: that factor is the 
 tendency of human beings to prefer an immediate 
 temporary well-being to an ultimate permanent well- 
 being conditioned on the acceptance of immediate 
 hardship or uncertainty. (“Apres nous le deluge ” 
 is a sentiment by no means peculiar to dissolute and 
 irresponsible monarchs. Humankind has always 
 shown a perfect willingness to let posterity pay its 
 bills and atone for its misdeeds. Labour at present 
 is comparatively well off in this country; and it is 
 significant that just those sections of it that are 
 most advantageously situated are strongest in their 
 opposition to the bolshevist experiment, namely : the 
 unions in the American Federation of Labour. 
 One can not unreservedly condemn their attitude; 
 there is much to be said for it. In a society orga- 
 nized as ours is, the mere loss of a job is, as I have 
 remarked elsewhere, terrible enough to keep one’s 
 thoughts from wandering on burning ground. The 
 labourer stands to lose through any radical economic 
 
Signs of Promise 279 
 
 readjustment quite as much as the monopolist, 
 that is, his all. If his all be sufficient to keep him 
 from want, he will naturally regard with apprehen- 
 sion any proposal to take it away for the moment, 
 even for the sake of his own possible future advan- 
 tage. The poor man, especially if he have a family, 
 is likely to feel that a present sufficiency is worth 
 much more than a future surplus. It is only when 
 people have literally nothing to lose but their chains 
 that they can face without fear the prospect of revo- 
 lutionary change. If the existing economic order 
 remains in force, that time will come in this country 
 as it came in pre-revolutionary France, and some- 
 thing over a century later in pre-revolutionary Rus- 
 sia; and when it does, there will be plenty of active 
 interest in freedom, and of underground movements 
 to bring it about by revolutionary methods. But at 
 present the “dissidence of Dissent and the protes- 
 tantism of the Protestant religion,” the Anti-Saloon 
 League, the one-hundred-per-centers, the Ku Klux 
 Klan, and the Republican party, are in unapproach- 
 able ascendancy. 
 
 This does not greatly matter. Force and pro- 
 scription are in the long run invariably ineffectual 
 against an idea. The idea released by the Ameri- 
 
280 Concerning Women 
 
 can and French revolutions — the idea of the right of 
 individual self-expression in politics — prevailed 
 over the combined forces of European feudalism; 
 and the idea released by the Russian Revolution will 
 prevail over the combined forces of European and 
 American imperialism. For ideas can be fought 
 neither with armies nor with persecutions; nor can 
 attention be for ever diverted from them. The only 
 thing that has effective force against an idea is a 
 better one. Whether or not the Soviet Government 
 succeeds in getting beyond dictatorship to the estab- 
 lishment of economic justice in Russia is not really 
 important. If it should fail, its failure will not 
 halt the progress of the idea that human freedom 
 is fundamentally a matter of economics. Not even 
 that acceptance in principle and denial in practice 
 which is the chief characteristic of Liberal policy, 
 can permanently defeat it. Sooner or later it will 
 penetrate into human consciousness; it will become 
 part of that consciousness; and it will prevail. 
 Whether or not it will prevail during this era of the 
 world’s history is another question, whose answer 
 will depend upon the readiness of mankind to as- 
 similate and be actuated by it. If it is not assimi- 
 lated in time to prevent the ruin of European civili- 
 
Signs of Promise 281 
 
 zation, then its ultimate victory will take place in a 
 future era, when European civilization has followed 
 the way of other civilizations to oblivion. 
 
 The process of assimilation is even now at work ; 
 with what effectiveness one may deduce from the 
 strength and determination of the forces arrayed 
 against it. It was no love for the Czar and the 
 Russian nobility that caused the Allied Governments 
 to spend millions of dollars in support of Kolchak, 
 Denikin, and Wrangel, just as it was no love for 
 Louis XVI and the French nobility that sent the 
 Duke of Brunswick into France at the head of the 
 Allies’ army. It was fear of the idea which ani- 
 mates the Bolshevist Government. It was not be- 
 cause the Allied Governments hated Germany less 
 but because they hated the Bolsheviki more that 
 they failed to assent to the Soviet Government’s pro- 
 posal to surrender Petrograd and Moscow, establish 
 a front in the Ural mountains, and continue the war 
 against Germany. It was not their belief in self- 
 determination, but their desire to interpose a buffer 
 State between the embattled proletariat of Russia 
 and the embattled imperialists of Western Europe, 
 that caused them to erect Poland into an independ- 
 ent State. Nor has anything but the most pressing 
 
282 Concerning Women 
 
 economic necessity moved any one of the Western 
 Governments to treat with the cynical realists of 
 Moscow, who have repeatedly embarrassed Allied 
 politicians by their persistent abstinence from the 
 hypocritical cant of the diplomat who has predatory 
 designs to justify. Nor was it any sudden access 
 of friendliness for Germany, or any noble superior- 
 ity to sectional jealousies and nationalist ambitions, 
 that moved these same Governments to sign the 
 agreement of Locarno; it was, rather, a desire to 
 make common cause against a Government whose 
 avowed purpose is to destroy the privileged interests 
 by and for which they themselves exist. Need any- 
 one suppose that they would do all these things if 
 they believed that the Russian idea could be local- 
 ized? Not even the desire of their privilegees to ex- 
 ploit the natural wealth of Russia could have 
 brought about a Locarno agreement. It was their 
 sense of a common danger that overcame their mu- 
 tual jealousies and distrust; the danger that the pro- 
 letarians of their own countries may, as their miser- 
 ies increase, be moved to emulate the proletarians of 
 Russia, that a sense of class-solidarity may overcome 
 traditional and national antipathies, and move them 
 to unite for the purpose of casting off their chains. 
 
Signs of Promise 283 
 
 There are tendencies in post-war Europe and 
 America which must be disturbing to the politician 
 who knows how to interpret them, if there be such a 
 politician; tendencies far more significant of future 
 developments than the mere existence of organized 
 revolutionary minorities or the activities of single 
 communists or anarchists, and much more difficult 
 to cope with. Chief among these is a growing dis- 
 respect for government; the progress of a healthy 
 cynicism concerning its nature and purpose, and a 
 promising disregard of those sumptuary laws which 
 do not meet with the convictions or desires of citi- 
 zens. This tendency is by no means confined to any 
 disaffected group or class. The citizen who is most 
 patriotic, and most wholeheartedly with his Govern- 
 ment in its attempts to coerce other people, may not 
 scruple to evade its attempts to coerce himself. 
 There is no articulate sentiment in this country, for 
 example, against the income-tax law; yet there are 
 few citizens who will not evade its incidence if pos- 
 sible, and feel themselves quite justified in doing so. 
 Or again, who has not heard people comfortably 
 provided with contraband liquor remark that they 
 believe prohibition to be an excellent thing for the 
 country in general? People may support the pol- 
 
284 Concerning Women 
 
 icies of a Government who entertain no illusions 
 whatever about the nature of its personnel — or about 
 the policies themselves for that matter — but who sup- 
 port them as a matter of self-interest or because they 
 see nothing better to do. But all this does not augur 
 especially well for the hold of government upon the 
 loyalty or imagination of the governed. It is a 
 truism that the Government which tries to enforce 
 one law to which its citizens do not subscribe, thereby 
 engenders disrespect for all law, and thus weakens 
 its authority. Again, the citizen who supports his 
 Government through self-interest or inertia may op- 
 pose it through self-interest or because his inertia 
 has been overcome. If he does not support it 
 through respect, its hold upon him is tenuous and 
 uncertain. 
 
 As for the growing numbers of the disaffected, 
 they show their loss of faith in so-called representa- 
 tive government, and their sense of helplessness, by 
 a practice of non-co-operation which is none the less 
 real because it is spontaneous and unorganized. 
 The number of qualified voters who abstain from us- 
 ing the ballot grows with every election; and this is 
 not surprising, since every voter of any intelligence 
 knows precisely what interests control government, 
 
Signs of Promise 285 
 
 and precisely what measure of self-determination 
 his apparent choice between rival candidates in- 
 volves. Even the old faith in Liberalism, or the 
 belief that the masses may get some voice in govern- 
 ment through “putting good men in office,” is not 
 what it once was. Liberalism displayed its true 
 colours during the war, and since the war it has not 
 been able to fool a great many of the people even 
 part of the time. It is worthy of note that every war- 
 Government of 1914 was a Liberal Government ex- 
 cept Russia’s. Mr. Wilson was a Liberal if there 
 ever was one; and Mr. Wilson’s Administration led 
 the American people into a costly war which was 
 of practical moment to only an infinitesimal minor- 
 ity of our population, and used the opportunity 
 created by war-hysteria to perpetrate the most high- 
 handed outrages against dissenters from his war- 
 policy. Mr. Wilson may have been sincerely in- 
 sincere, as one clever critic put it; but whether he 
 was so or not, he gave the American people a 
 thorough, high-priced lesson in the essential hypoc- 
 risy of Liberalism. Mr. Wilson, and his fellow- 
 Liberals of Europe, showed the world that the real 
 interests of Liberalism and those of Toryism are 
 identical, and that when those interests are endan- 
 
286 Concerning Women 
 
 gered it is impossible to distinguish between Liberal 
 and Tory behaviour. 
 
 It has, indeed, become abundantly clear since the 
 war that a realignment of forces is inevitable; a re- 
 alignment which shall represent not merely two fac- 
 tions differing slightly in regard to the non-essentials 
 of government but one in the fundamental purpose 
 of furthering economic exploitation; but a realign- 
 ment which shall represent the cleavage which exists 
 already, and will be widened as time goes on, be- 
 tween those who wish to perpetuate economic ex- 
 ploitation and those who wish it abolished. The 
 remark which one frequently hears, that the two 
 great parties in this country represent the same in- 
 terests, means that they are both maintained by, and 
 directly represent, the interest of monopoly which is 
 engaged in exploiting industry. Their superficial 
 differences, even, are notoriously insignificant, and 
 fundamentally their interests and their source of 
 power are identical. The logical cleavage, there- 
 fore, is between members of those two parties with 
 all mere Liberals and reformers, on the one side, and 
 advocates of economic justice on the other. It is 
 really too late for compromise; too late for govern- 
 ment to do everything for the exploited masses ex- 
 
Signs of Promise 287 
 
 cept get off their backs, as the German Imperial 
 Government did so admirably before the war. Gov- 
 ernments have become too corrupt and too ruthless, 
 and the interests behind them too greedy, to perceive 
 the wisdom of such a course. If the policy of 
 coercion is in the ascendancy, if the executive arm of 
 political government is everywhere usurping the 
 function of the legislative arm, if parliamentarism 
 and republicanism seem about to merge into dic- 
 tatorship, it is because the ruling classes are much 
 more aw T are of the coming struggle than are those 
 classes whose interests will range them on the other 
 side; and if many people now support government 
 whose interests are against it, it is because they have 
 not yet awakened to a realization of their true posi- 
 tion. The increasing cynicism of the governed con- 
 cerning the nature and purposes of government 
 really marks an important advance toward the new 
 alignment of forces. It is not a long step from the 
 realization that government does not represent the 
 general interest, to a discovery of the direction in 
 which that interest lies. 
 
 Along with this cynicism go other signs of a 
 changing attitude. There is a conspicuous falling 
 off of faith in what might be called the unofficial 
 
288 Concerning Women 
 
 adjuncts of government, namely: the press and the 
 pulpit. The changing attitude towards organized 
 religion was recognized and defined in the Pope’s 
 recent Encyclical Letter condemning the progress of 
 laicism in all the countries of the Christian world, 
 and the accompanying tendency to discuss Christian- 
 ity as if it were merely one of the historical faiths, 
 like Mohammedanism or Buddhism, instead of the 
 only true, revealed religion. It is recognized also 
 in the attempts to which I have alluded above, by 
 certain Protestant sects in this country to secure laws 
 forbidding the teaching of the theory of evolution. 
 It is true that science and the printing-press have 
 robbed a secularized church of its main source of in- 
 fluence over the minds of men, the one by discover- 
 ing and proclaiming the natural laws behind those 
 phenomena which ignorance attributed to benign 
 or evil spirits; and the other by facilitating the gen- 
 eral dissemination of knowledge. The Church can 
 no longer effectively appeal to fear. For a church 
 which very early became a class-organization, and 
 one of the large-scale promoters and beneficiaries of 
 economic exploitation, this is a serious thing. Its 
 promises and its comminations are becoming alike 
 ineffectual in face of mankind’s growing concern 
 
Signs of Promise 289 
 
 with the spiritual effect of involuntary poverty and 
 wretchedness upon the human spirit in this present 
 world. The modem cynicism towards paternalism 
 in government and industry finds its counterpart in 
 cynicism concerning organized Christianity. In an 
 age which questions the justice of mankind’s arbi- 
 trary division into classes, such an Encyclical as that 
 of Pope Leo XIII which enjoined masters to be 
 lenient and the subject masses to be patient is already 
 an anachronism; and the injunction put by the 
 Church of England upon candidates for confirma- 
 tion to order themselves lowly and reverently unto 
 all their betters is more likely to arouse antagonism 
 than to win compliance. The churches do not 
 understand the new psychology with which they 
 have to deal. They are offering dogmatic creeds to 
 an age which is suspicious of all dogma; they are 
 upholding traditional moral criteria in an age when 
 the foundations of factitious morality are being gen- 
 erally scrutinized by the light of reason and knowl- 
 edge; they are preaching Salvationist doctrine in 
 terms which no longer edify or recommend them- 
 selves to serious attention. All this is merely to say 
 that organized religion, like political government, 
 remains static in the midst of flux; and like political 
 
290 Concerning Women 
 
 government it faces a spontaneous and widespread 
 if entirely unorganized popular movement of non- 
 cooperation. 
 
 As for that large majority of prosperous 
 newspaper-concerns which are stigmatized in social- 
 ist literature as the “kept press,” they have been so 
 over-eager in the partisanship of their editorial writ- 
 ing and in the colouring of their news or its manu- 
 facture out of whole cloth, that there is discernible a 
 decided change in the popular attitude towards them. 
 The power of the printed word is still great out of 
 all proportion to its weight ; but editorial pronounce- 
 ments, if they are read at all, are by no means swal- 
 lowed as the undiluted milk of the word, as they were 
 in the day when Horace Greeley used daily in the 
 Tribune to dictate opinion to a large section of the 
 American public. It is significant that since the 
 advertising department has come to take precedence 
 over the editorial department, there has been a de- 
 cided falling-off in respect for journalism and a 
 marked decrease in the number of honest and able 
 people who take up journalistic work. This was to 
 be expected. The modern newspaper is essentially 
 an advertising medium, and its editorial writing and 
 presentation of news must conform to its general 
 
Signs of Promise 291 
 
 character. Under these circumstances men of in- 
 tellectual ability and integrity are no longer attracted 
 by such work, as they are no longer, for an analo- 
 gous reason, attracted to governmental office or to the 
 pulpit. The consequent deterioration in journalistic 
 personnel contributes further to the newspaper’s loss 
 of prestige — again as in the case of the personnel of 
 government and of the churches. As all those in- 
 stitutions lose the power to command respect and al- 
 legiance, they progressively lose power to attract able 
 and honest minds to their service; and as they lose 
 this power of attraction, their power to command re- 
 spect progressively dwindles; and thus by alternate 
 reactions they tend to disintegration. To return to 
 the press, it is symptomatic of the loss of popular 
 faith in its moral and intellectual character that peo- 
 ple buy this newspaper or that so largely because of 
 special features — local news, sporting news, this per- 
 son’s column or that person’s cartoons. It is no 
 exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority 
 of Americans look to their newspapers not for in- 
 formation but for entertainment or excitement; a 
 fact which is amply attested by the amount of space 
 devoted to special features, comic strips and cheap 
 stories, and above all by the extraordinary success 
 
292 Concerning Women 
 
 of a new tabloid type of newspaper devoted almost 
 exclusively to pictures, accompanied by the most 
 sensational kind of backstairs gossip. In the par- 
 lance of the street, the modern newspaper is “giving 
 ’em what they want”; and while the preference is a 
 sad reflection on public taste, its gratification is an 
 equally sad reflection on the quality and standing 
 of American journalism. The newspaper, in short, 
 as I have said, no longer informs or guides opinion; 
 it purveys amusement. 
 
 The same deterioration, with concomitant loss of 
 prestige, that is proceeding in government, the 
 church and the press, is evident in educational in- 
 stitutions. This is a natural and inevitable develop- 
 ment, since education is so largely under political 
 control. The powers which control government are 
 in control of education; and those powers quite 
 naturally will not tolerate any teaching which even 
 implies a revaluation of the existing economic, 
 political or social organization. This intolerance 
 is effective even in institutions not under direct con- 
 trol by the State; for those institutions are largely 
 dependent on wealthy benefactors, and wealth is al- 
 most entirely in control of people who have a direct 
 interest in the preservation of the established order. 
 
Signs of Promise 293 
 
 Under these circumstances, the primary purpose of 
 education, which is to develop the mind and help 
 it to independent progress along the paths of 
 truth and reason, is rendered impossible of fulfil- 
 ment; and our schools have pretty generally sub- 
 stituted for this purpose another and lower one 
 which is calculated neither to embarrass nor offend 
 the powers on which they depend. This is the vo- 
 cational purpose. Thus they have ceased to be 
 centres of culture, and become centres of training 
 whose object is to turn out graduates who shall re- 
 semble one another as closely as possible in all things 
 save in special vocational training. As Professor 
 Jerome Davis recently expressed it, our colleges are 
 turning out machine-made minds. The deteriora- 
 tion in the personnel of the teaching profession is 
 consequently quite as marked as that in government, 
 the churches and the press. Independence of spirit 
 is not tolerated by school-directors and boards of 
 regents. Teaching, moreover, being held in little 
 respect by the State, to whose interests it is obviously 
 inimical if prosecuted intelligently and seriously, 
 is so poorly paid that people who can possibly do 
 better elsewhere are naturally unwilling to become 
 teachers. It is needless to dwell upon the demoral- 
 
294 Concerning Women 
 
 izing and vulgarizing effect of these circumstances 
 on the schools themselves and those who attend them. 
 It is too obvious and has been already too often dis- 
 cussed, to require consideration here. What I do 
 wish to note is the fact that this educational system 
 does not escape criticism and distrust; and that 
 the most interesting and promising manifestation of 
 this distrust is evident not among outsiders or 
 alumni, but among undergraduates. Too much 
 may not be expected of it, but the “youth-move- 
 ment” which is afoot among students may not be dis- 
 regarded ; it is symptomatic of a critical attitude and 
 a spirit of revolt which may not be wholly without 
 effect. 
 
 These are negative signs of progress, if one will, 
 but none the less impressive for that. They indi- 
 cate a growing sense of discomfort in the environ- 
 ment provided by established institutions, and a loss 
 of faith in those institutions as they deterioriate un- 
 der the spread of their own corruption. On the posi- 
 tive side one may cite the growing power of eco- 
 nomic organization, and its tendency to displace 
 political organization. The appearance in the 
 American Congress of a group known as the “farm- 
 bloc” is an interesting instance of this tendency. 
 
Signs of Promise 295 
 
 Here is a group of political representatives with 
 whom an economic interest is frankly placed ahead 
 of political affiliation. They arc primarily neither 
 Democrats nor Republicans, neitiier conservatives 
 nor progressives; they are primarily representa- 
 tive of a producing group. As such, they stand for 
 a departure from the theory of representative politi- 
 cal government, which assumes that representation 
 shall be not industrial but geographic. According 
 to this theory, the representatives from each arbi- 
 trarily fixed geographical unit are supposed to rep- 
 resent the interests of all the citizens within that 
 unit. This evidently leaves out of account not only 
 the fact that economic interests are primarily in- 
 dustrial or occupational and only secondarily and 
 fortuitously sectional, but also the fact that the eco- 
 nomic interests within a given area may be mu- 
 tually inimical. In practice, of course, political 
 representatives have really represented the dominant 
 economic interest within their allotted territory, the 
 interest which has exercised the strongest political 
 influence ; but since in theory they must represent all 
 interests, they have not been able to represent that 
 dominant interest openly, but have had to resort to 
 subterfuge and dishonesty. Even the members of 
 
296 Concerning Women 
 
 the farm-bloc, were they representing districts where 
 agriculture was not the dominant industry, would 
 no doubt be less open in their espousal of its interest. 
 None the less they have dared, in disregard of 
 party-discipline, to form a bloc which stands 
 squarely for the interest of a producing class ; and in 
 doing so they have taken a step towards the system 
 of industrial representation which has of late made 
 great strides in European countries, more especially 
 in Russia and Germany. Although the group 
 which has taken this step may be unimportant polit- 
 ically, save when a close division chances to throw 
 the balance of power into its hands, the step it has 
 taken is of the utmost importance; for if economic 
 representation should proceed until it eventually 
 superseded geographical representation, the change 
 would not only involve the destruction of the bi- 
 partisan machine which controls government in this 
 country; it would naturally bring about an open 
 alignment of the producing interests against the in- 
 terests of exploitation, and thus make clear the final 
 and fundamental issue of which I have spoken — the 
 question whether economic exploitation is to be per- 
 petuated or abolished. 
 
 A good deal of non-political organization shows 
 
Signs of Promise 297 
 
 the same trend. The growth of co-operation, for 
 example, in production, marketing, and consump- 
 tion, is evidence of an attempt to evade through 
 group-action those exactions of government’s ben- 
 eficiaries against which the single individual is 
 powerless to protect himself. The growth of offen- 
 sive and defensive organization among capitalists 
 on the one side and workers on the other, not only 
 implies recognition of the primary importance of 
 economic interests and the value of co-operation 
 among groups whose economic interests are iden- 
 tical ; it implies also an acknowledgment that neither 
 capital nor labour receives from government what 
 it will accept as adequate protection of its interests 
 — as, of course, neither can, since the interest that 
 government exists to protect — the interest of mo- 
 noply — is directly inimical to both. Moreover, as 
 this organization becomes international in scope it 
 constitutes a negation of the political differences 
 which bolster up rival national organizations. 
 That it has not yet become strong enough to prevent 
 nationalistic wars, is true; but this is because the 
 fact that war is a clash, not of rival producing in- 
 terests, but of rival exploiting interests has not yet 
 become sufficiently clear to overcome a specious pa- 
 
298 Concerning Women 
 
 triotism and the traditional distrust and prejudice 
 which governments have assiduously inculcated 
 upon the governed. The producing classes are 
 really behind the exploiting classes in discovering 
 that their interests are pretty much the same, what- 
 ever their various nationalities may be. Govern- 
 ments have always co-operated when any rebellious 
 move by the governed in any country threatened the 
 established economic and political order; as they 
 co-operated in the Holy Alliance against France, or 
 in a similar alliance against Russia, and as they are 
 now co-operating in the League of Nations against 
 the exploited classes in all countries. When the ex- 
 ploited classes understand their own position as 
 clearly as the exploiting classes have understood 
 theirs, organization for defense and offense will no 
 longer be national and vertical but horizontal and in- 
 ternational. The real issue will be drawn at last. 
 Hence the tendency of capital and labour toward in- 
 ternational organization along the lines of economic 
 interest is an extremely hopeful sign that the produc- 
 ing classes are beginning to realize that their major 
 interests are not political but economic, and that the 
 quarrels of Governments are injurious to those in- 
 terests; that they are beginning to outgrow the nar- 
 
Signs of Promise 299 
 
 row nationalism which has facilitated their exploi- 
 tation in the past, and made it possible to pit them 
 against one another in the quarrels of rival exploit- 
 ing classes. 
 
 11 
 
 All these signs of disaffection under the old order 
 of things and the gropings towards a new, do not 
 imply, of course, any growth of the spirit of free- 
 dom, or any new consciousness of its nature. They 
 do indicate, however, the progress of a temper which, 
 when it shall have become more pervasive and more 
 deeply rooted, will be hospitable to the doctrine of 
 freedom. Discontent with the established order 
 must necessarily precede any serious move toward 
 its displacement by a new order; and discontent, 
 while it is by no means dominant at present, is wide- 
 spread enough to cause Governments a good deal of 
 anxiety. The very tightening of the grip of govern- 
 ment which is evident in the present tendency to sup- 
 press legislative bodies, and in ruthless persecution 
 of economic dissenters, is, as I have already re- 
 marked, a sure indication of the extent and strength 
 of the dissenting forces. When those people who 
 now endure the harassment of governmental waste 
 
300 Concerning Women 
 
 and industrial exploitation, shall perceive that 
 relief is to be gained not through futile political re- 
 forms aimed at amelioration of their lot, but through 
 a radical readjustment of the whole economic sys- 
 tem — when, in other words, they realize “what is 
 to be done” — then and not before, will come the real 
 test of the tenacity of the old order and the strength 
 of the forces moving towards the new. On its side 
 the old order will have governmental organization 
 and armed forces, and the enormous influence of the 
 superstitious tendency to regard as right that which 
 is established, supporting the interest of a com- 
 pact, wealthy, and highly organized exploiting class. 
 The new order will have on its side the newly real- 
 ized need of the majority without whose acquies- 
 cence a highly organized minority can not long 
 maintain itself in power. The issue will depend, 
 obviously, not only on the intelligence, ability and 
 determination of the majority’s leaders, but upon 
 their clear understanding of the issue involved. If 
 they compromise, as the leaders of the French Rev- 
 olution compromised, the cause of justice will be 
 lost, and the most that will be gained will be a shift- 
 ing of privilege. The Western world is faced at 
 present with the alternative of establishing an en- 
 
Signs of Promise 301 
 
 during civilization on the sure foundation of eco- 
 nomic justice, or of sinking back into barbarism 
 through a long series of civil and international 
 struggles for possession of the power to exploit. If 
 it follow the latter course, its civilization will go the 
 way of the civilization of Egypt, Greece, and Rome ; 
 and its vitality, like theirs, will so decrease under the 
 dual drain of exploitation and war that it will 
 eventually fall, as they fell, an easy prey to some 
 strong external force. 
 
 The task before those who wish to avert this fate, 
 whose passionate desire is to bring about an endur- 
 ing civilization based on the solid foundation of eco- 
 nomic justice, is the task of educating themselves 
 in the nature of freedom, of learning to face freedom 
 without fear, and of communicating to others their 
 understanding and their courage. The women of 
 today, especially in this country, are in a peculiarly 
 good position to undertake this task They enjoy 
 unprecedented advantages in the way of social and 
 intellectual autonomy, and of educational oppor- 
 tunity. They have emerged successful from a long 
 struggle for political equality with men, and they 
 are still engaged in an organized effort to secure 
 legal equality. Thus they have their hand in, as it 
 
302 Concerning Women 
 
 were, with the work of removing the artificial dis- 
 abilities which organized society imposes on a subject 
 class in order to keep it subject; and this work 
 should have engendered in those who have been ac- 
 tive in it a healthy resentment of social injustice 
 and a sense of the value of freedom to the human 
 spirit. They will still have, moreover, even after 
 legal equality is won, a considerable number of dis- 
 criminations to combat, which should operate 
 against the temptation to regard their fight as won, 
 and to relax the vigilance which is always neces- 
 sary to preserve individual rights against encroach- 
 ment by organized society. The organizations 
 through which they have worked remain intact; it 
 is for them to determine whether those organiza- 
 tions shall continue as mere agencies for political 
 lobbying or whether they will carry on the demand 
 for freedom to its logical end. 
 
 The fact that women are in a good position to 
 inquire into the nature of freedom offers, of course, 
 no earnest that they will do so. In spite of the 
 reasonableness of such a course, they may content 
 themselves with trying to effect the ultimate equality 
 of the sexes through political measures which in 
 their nature can never effect it — provided, that is, 
 
Signs of Promise 303 
 
 that events do not move too fast for even a serious 
 trial of such inept methods. A good deal of mirth 
 has already been aroused in certain quarters by 
 trivial and futile reform-measures which women 
 politicians have sponsored. If this sort of thing 
 shall prove to be the sum-total of women’s contribu- 
 tion to social problems, it will merely prove that 
 they are quite as incapable of an intelligent under- 
 standing of those problems as men have hitherto 
 shown themselves to be. If women are now in a 
 good position to school themselves in the tradition 
 of economic freedom, the men of Europe and Amer- 
 ica have been in an equally good position to do so 
 since the political revolutions of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, and as yet they have given no very encourag- 
 ing signs of progress. However much one may 
 hope that women will make a better showing, it 
 would be unfair to expect it of them; for they are 
 but now emerging from the mental and spiritual 
 condition induced by centuries of subjection. If, 
 therefore, they fail to grasp their opportunity to 
 contribute to the process of education which must 
 precede the establishment of economic justice; if 
 they are content to fix their minds upon this or 
 that special aspect of social freedom or of political 
 
304 Concerning Women 
 
 freedom, instead of looking steadily towards eco- 
 nomic freedom — economic freedom for men and 
 women alike — the judicious critic may lament their 
 failure or disparage their tactics, but he can hardly 
 attribute either to any stupidity or incapacity pecu- 
 liar to their sex, since it is through the same failure 
 and the same tactics that men have brought civiliza- 
 tion to the critical state in which it is at present. 
 
 The great point, however, is that if they fail they 
 are sure to pay for their failure a higher price than 
 men will pay. As they have more to gain from free- 
 dom than men, so they have more to lose than men 
 if the Western world shall fail to establish its civil- 
 ization on the firm basis of economic justice. In 
 the relapse into barbarism which must attend the 
 ultimate breakdown of economic and social life 
 under the monopolistic system, physical force will 
 be even more strongly ascendant than it is at present ; 
 and when physical force dominates, the ideals of 
 justice and liberty are, as I have already remarked, 
 without effective influence — the only right is 
 might. The well-being of women depends in very 
 great measure on the prevalence of those ideals ; for 
 when force is dominant, woman’s physical dis- 
 advantage as the child-bearing sex places her in a 
 
Signs of Promise 305 
 
 position to be more readily subjected and exploited 
 than man. Because of this disadvantage she was 
 the first victim of exploitation; because of it, she 
 will be the last to escape; and because of it she will 
 be the greater sufferer from exploitation so long as 
 exploitation shall be the basis of the economic and 
 social order. There is potential tragedy in the fact 
 that the Western world has become civilized enough 
 to perceive the injustice involved in women’s sub- 
 jection only when the economic order which deter- 
 mines its social life has become so corrupt that it 
 threatens the destruction of civilization, with all 
 such gains in humanity as civilization has yielded. 
 Women have equality almost within their grasp; 
 they may lose it if this civilization shall follow 
 the path of its predecessors to ruin and oblivion. 
 There is one way to avert this tragedy, and one 
 only — the way of economic justice. If the women 
 who have been active in the struggle to emancipate 
 their sex shall enlarge their conception of freedom, 
 and with it the scope of their demand, they can help 
 mightily to preserve civilization through the estab- 
 lishment of justice. If they could win their sex 
 away from the exploded formulas of the eighteenth 
 century and bring them to understand that political 
 
306 Concerning Women 
 
 and social freedom without economic freedom are 
 utterly illusory, that true freedom proceeds from 
 economic justice, and that justice and freedom offer 
 the only hope for the salvaging of this civilization, 
 they would have won half of humanity, and that 
 would be a contribution of no small value. One 
 thing is certain : the question of freedom for women 
 can not proceed much farther as an independent 
 issue. It has reached the point where it must nec- 
 essarily merge in the greater question of human free- 
 dom. Upon the fate of the greater cause, that of 
 the lesser will depend. It is for feminists to choose 
 whether they will merge the feminist in the human- 
 ist, or whether they will play at political and social 
 make-believe while the issue is being decided, and 
 either suffer in the event the consequences of a fail- 
 ure which they shall have made no effort to avert, 
 or enjoy the benefits of a success which they shall 
 have done nothing to attain. 
 
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 OCT 2 8 4e 
 
 
 
 GARJui: 
 
 Hi ' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 L. B. Cat. No. 1 137