The present economic position of women bristles with anomalies. It
is the outcome of long ages of semi-serfdom, when women toiled
continuously to produce wealth, which, if they were married, they
could enjoy only at the good pleasure of their lords,--ages when the
work of most women was conditioned and subordinated by male dominance.
Yet in those days the working housewife commanded the consideration
always conceded to a bread-winner--even when dependent. In modern
times women's economic position has been undermined by the helpless
dependence engendered amongst the well-to-do by "parasitism" resulting
from nineteenth-century luxury--to quote the striking word of Olive
Schreiner. Similarly, dependence has been forced upon large sections
of women-folk amongst the manual workers by the loss of their hold
upon land and by the decay of home industries. Now a new force is at
work: the revolt of the modern woman against parasitism and dependence
in all their forms; her demand for freedom to work and to choose her
sphere of work, as well as for the right to dispose of what she gains.

Six years ago some women of the Fabian Society, deeply stirred by the
tremendous social import of this movement, banded themselves together
to unravel the tangled skein of women's economic subjection and to
discover how its knots were tied. The first step was to get women to
speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances as matters
boldly to be faced. Whatever the truth may turn out to be with regard
to natural and inevitable differences of faculty between men and
women, it is at least certain that difference of sex, like any other
persistent condition of individual existence, implies some difference
of outlook. The woman's own standpoint--that is the first essential in
understanding her position, economic or other: the trouble is that
she has but recently begun to realise that she inevitably has a