I have carefully avoided using the word "allowance" in what has been said,
because that word seems to imply the untrue and mean assumption that the
money is all the husband's to give or withhold as he will. Yet I have heard
this sort of phrase from men who were living on a wife's property or a
wife's earnings; from men who nominally kept boarding-houses, working a
little, while their wives worked hard,--or from farmers, who worked hard,
and made their wives work harder. Even in cases where the wife has no
direct part in the money-making, the indirect part she performs, if she
takes faithful charge of her household, is so essential, so beyond all
compensation in money, that it is an utter shame and impertinence in the
husband when he speaks of "giving" money to his wife as if it were an act
of favor. It is no more an act of favor than when the business manager of a
firm pays out money to the unseen partner who directs the indoor business
or runs the machinery. Be the joint income more or less, the wife has a
claim to her honorable share, and that as a matter of right, without the
daily ignominy of sending in a petition for it.





WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD


I always groan in spirit when any advocate of woman suffrage, carried away
by zeal, says anything disrespectful about the nursery. It is contrary to
the general tone of feeling among reformers, I am sure, to speak of this
priceless institution as a trivial or degrading sphere, unworthy the
emancipated woman. It is rarely that anybody speaks in this way; but a