That this should be so is true; that it is so now, in the case of union
between two perfectly morally developed humans, is also true, and that this
condition may in a distant future be almost universal is certainly true.
But dealing with this matter as a practical question today, we have to
consider not what should be, or what may be, but what, given traditions and
institutions of our societies, is, today.) Especially I have feared that
the points dealt with in this little book, when taken apart from other
aspects of the question, might lead to the conception that it was intended
to express the thought, that it was possible or desirable that woman in
addition to her child-bearing should take from man his share in the support
and care of his offspring or of the woman who fulfilled with regard to
himself domestic duties of any kind. In that chapter in the original book
devoted to the consideration of man's labour in connection with woman and
with his offspring more than one hundred pages were devoted to illustrating
how essential to the humanising and civilising of man, and therefore of the
whole race, was an increased sense of sexual and paternal responsibility,
and an increased justice towards woman as a domestic labourer. In the last
half of the same chapter I dealt at great length with what seems to me an
even more pressing practical sex question at this moment--man's attitude
towards those women who are not engaged in domestic labour; toward that
vast and always increasing body of women, who as modern conditions develop
are thrown out into the stream of modern economic life to sustain
themselves and often others by their own labour; and who yet are there
bound hand and foot, not by the intellectual or physical limitations of
their nature, but by artificial constrictions and conventions, the remnants
of a past condition of society. It is largely this maladjustment, which,
deeply studied in all its ramifications, will be found to lie as the
taproot and central source of the most terrible of the social diseases that
afflict us.