are to the effect that a woman who keeps house for the service of
herself, her husband, and the other inmates, gives her work in return for
maintenance, and is not a dependent but a colleague, I must wish that
ideas "mistily" held were often so just, and ideas vaguely believed were
often so well founded. Those who charge the husband with "employing" his
wife choose to neglect the fact that she is mistress and hostess, as well
as "servant" or "housekeeper," ministering to herself and to the guests
in whose company she has pleasure, and to whose respect she has a right.
Our economic author proceeds: "We are the only animal species in which
the sex relation is also an economic factor. . . We have not been
accustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization that it was
'natural,' and that other animals did so too." Has anyone really been so
rash as to aver "that other animals did so too"? The obvious truth is
that other animals do otherwise, but that, whatever they do, they make no
rule or example for man. Again: "Whatever the economic value of the
domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do the
most work get the least money." And yet but now they were charged with
"getting it" too dependently, or rather, with having it "got" for them by
man! Is this writer indeed misled by that mere word "money," which she
here lets slip?

"He nearly persuades me to go on all fours," sighs Voltaire rising--rising
erect reluctantly, one may almost say--from the reading of Rousseau.




THE UNREADY