she supports, be turned out into the streets? For, it is remarkable, that,
with theorists of this class, it is not toil, or the amount of toil,
crushing alike to brain and body, which the female undertakes that is
objected to; it is the form and the amount of the reward. It is not the
hand-labouring woman, even in his own society, worn out and prematurely
aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that has no beginning and knows
no end--

"Man's work is from sun to sun,
But the woman's work is never done"--

it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his shirts,
or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in the sweater's den
where she sews the garments in which he appears so radiantly in the
drawing-room which disturbs him. It is the thought of the woman-doctor
with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives round in her carriage to
see her patients, or receives them in her consulting-rooms, and who spends
the evening smoking and reading before her study fire or receiving her
guests; it is the thought of the woman who, as legislator, may loll for
perhaps six hours of the day on the padded seat of legislative bench,
relieving the tedium now and then by a turn in the billiard- or
refreshment-room, when she is not needed to vote or speak; it is the
thought of the woman as Greek professor, with three or four hundred a year,
who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and has leisure to enjoy the
society of her husband and children, and to devote to her own study and
life of thought; it is she who wrings his heart. It is not the woman, who,
on hands and knees, at tenpence a day, scrubs the floors of the public
buildings, or private dwellings, that fills him with anguish for womanhood:
that somewhat quadrupedal posture is for him truly feminine, and does not
interfere with his ideal of the mother and child-bearer; and that, in some