Marriage as a Trade | Page 5

even to possess that organ; and as a substitute for the wages
wherewith she buys food to fill it, she is offered the lifting of a hat and
the resignation of a seat in a tramcar. She rejects the offer, obeys the
first law of nature, and is rebuked for it -- the human male, bred in the
conviction that she lives for him alone, standing aghast. Some day he
will discover that woman does not support life only in order to obtain a
husband, but frequently obtains a husband only in order to support life.
The above is, to my mind, a clear and familiar instance of the manner
in which man is accustomed to take for granted our exemption from a
law from which there is no exemption. It matters not whether or no he
believes, in so many words, that we need not eat in order that we may
not die; the point is, that he acts as if he believed it. (The extreme
reluctance of local authorities to spend any of the money at their
disposal on unemployed women is a case in point. It would be
ridiculous to ascribe it to animosity towards the women themselves -- it
must arise, therefore, from a conviction that the need of the foodless
woman is not so pressing as the need of the foodless man.) And it is
because I have so often come in contact with the state of mind that
makes such delusions possible, that I have thought it necessary to insist
on the fact that self-preservation is the first law of our being. The
purpose of race-preservation, which is commonly supposed to be the
excuse for our existence, is, and must be, secondary and derivative; it is
quite impossible for a woman to bring children into the world unless
she has first obtained the means of supporting her own life. How to eat,

how to maintain existence, is the problem that has confronted woman,
as well as man, since the ages dawned for her. Other needs and desires
may come later; but the first call of life is for the means of supporting
it.
To support life it is necessary to have access to the fruits of the earth,
either directly -- as in the case of the agriculturist -- or indirectly, and
through a process of exchange as the price of work done in other
directions. And in this process of exchange woman, as compared with
her male fellow-worker, has always been at a disadvantage. The latter,
even where direct access to the earth was denied to him, has usually
been granted some measure of choice as to the manner in which he
would pay for the necessities the earth produced for him -- that is to say,
he was permitted to select the trade by which he earned his livelihood.
From woman, who has always been far more completely excluded from
direct access to the necessities of life, who has often been barred, both
by law and by custom, from the possession of property, one form of
payment was demanded, and one only. It was demanded of her that she
should enkindle and satisfy the desire of the male, who would
thereupon admit her to such share of the property he possessed or
earned as should seem good to him. In other words, she exchanged, by
the ordinary process of barter, possession of her person for the means
of existence.
Whether such a state of things is natural or unnatural I do not pretend to
say; but it is, I understand, peculiar to women, having no exact
counterpart amongst the females of other species. Its existence, at any
rate, justifies us in regarding marriage as essentially (from the woman's
point of view) a commercial or trade undertaking. By marriage she
earned her bread; and as the instinct of self-preservation drove man
forth to hunt, to till the soil, to dig beneath it -- to cultivate his muscles
and his brain so that he might get the better of nature and his rivals -- so
brute necessity and the instinct of self-preservation in woman urged
and enjoined on her the cultivation of those narrow and particular
qualities of mind and body whereby desire might be excited and her
wage obtained.

A man who was also a poet has thoughtfully explained that
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole
existence."
(It must be very pleasant to be a man and to entertain that conviction.)
Translated into feminine and vulgar prose, the effusion runs something
like this --
The housekeeping trade is the only one open to us -- so we enter the
housekeeping trade in order to live. This is not always quite the same as
entering the housekeeping trade in order