life, dividing the man and woman as soon as the first sheen of physical
sexual attraction which glints only over the unknown begins to fade, and
from which springs so large a part of the tragedy of modern conjugal
relations. The primitive male might discuss with her his success in
hunting and her success in finding roots; as the primitive peasant may
discuss today with his wife the crops and cows in which both are equally
interested and which both understand; there is nothing in their order of
life to produce always increasingly divergent habits of thought and
interest.

In modern civilised life, in many sections, the lack of any common labour
and interests and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by the man and the
woman, tend continually to produce increasing divergence; so that, long
before middle life is reached, they are left without any bond of co-
cohesion but that of habit. The comradeship and continual stimulation,
rising from intercourse with those sharing our closest interests and
regarding life from the same standpoint, the man tends to seek in his club
and among his male companions, and the woman accepts solitude, or seeks
dissipations which tend yet farther to disrupt the common conjugal life. A
certain mental camaraderie and community of impersonal interests is
imperative in conjugal life in addition to a purely sexual relation, if the
union is to remain a living and always growing reality. It is more
especially because the sharing by woman of the labours of man will tend to
promote camaraderie and the existence of common, impersonal interests and
like habits of thought and life, that the entrance of women into the very
fields shared by men, and not into others peculiarly reserved for her, is
so desirable. (The reply once given by the wife of a leading barrister,
when reference was made to the fact that she and her husband were seldom
found in each other's society, throws a painful but true light on certain
aspects of modern life, against which the entire woman's movement of our