Marriage as a Trade | Page 9

and the consequent impossibility of activity in this

or that direction? -- knowing, all the while, that what they swear to her
she cannot do she does, is doing day by day!
Some day, no doubt, the pendulum will adjust itself and swing true; a
generation brought up to a wider horizon as a matter of course will look
around it with undazzled eyes and set to work to reconstruct the
fundamental from the ruins of what was once esteemed so. But in the
mean time the new is -- new; the independence that was to be as Dead
Sea ashes in our mouth tastes very sweet indeed; and the unsheltered
life that we were taught to shrink from means the fighting of a good
fight . . . .
Selfishness, perhaps -- all selfishness -- this pleasure in ourselves and
in the late growth of that which our training had denied us. But then,
from our point of view, the sin and crime of woman in the past has
been a selflessness which was ignoble because involuntary. Our creed
may be vague as yet, but one article thereof is fixed: there is no merit in
a sacrifice which is compulsory, no virtue in a gift which is not a gift
but a tribute.
III
I HAVE insisted so strongly upon what I believe to be the attitude
towards life of the independent woman mainly with the object of
proving my assertion that there are other faculties in our nature besides
those which have hitherto been forced under a hothouse system of
cultivation -- sex and motherhood. It is quite possible that a woman
thinking, feeling and living in a manner I have described may be
dubbed unsexed; but even if she be what is technically termed unsexed,
it does not follow therefore that she is either unnatural or unwomanly.
Sex is only one of the ingredients of the natural woman -- an ingredient
which has assumed undue and exaggerated proportions in her life
owing to the fact that it has for many generations furnished her with the
means of livelihood.
In sexual matters it would appear that the whole trend and tendency of
man's relations to woman has been to make refusal impossible and to
cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire. His

motive in concentrating all her energy upon the trade of marriage was
to deny it any other outlet. The original motive was doubtless
strengthened, as time went on, by an objection to allowing her to come
into economic competition with him; but this was probably a secondary
or derivative cause of his persistent refusal to allow her new spheres of
activity, having its primary root in the consciousness that economic
independence would bring with it the power of refusal.
The uncompromising and rather brutal attitude which man has
consistently adopted towards the spinster is, to my mind, a
confirmation of this theory. (The corresponding attitude of the married
woman towards her unmarried sister I take to be merely servile and
imitative.) It was not only that the creature was chaste and therefore
inhuman. That would have justified neglect and contempt on his part,
but not the active dislike he always appears to have entertained for her.
That active and somewhat savage dislike must have had its origin in the
consciousness that the perpetual virgin was a witness, however
reluctantly, to the unpalatable fact that sexual intercourse was not for
every woman an absolute necessity; and this uneasy consciousness on
his part accounts for the systematic manner in which he placed the
spinster outside the pale of a chivalry, upon which, from her
unprotected position, one would have expected her to have an especial
claim.
If it be granted that marriage is, as I have called it, essentially a trade on
the part of woman -- the exchange of her person for the means of
subsistence -- it is legitimate to inquire into the manner in which that
trade is carried on, and to compare the position of the worker in the
matrimonial with the position of the worker in any other market. Which
brings us at once to the fact -- arising from the compulsory nature of
the profession -- that it is carried on under disadvantages unknown and
unfelt by those who earn their living by other methods. For the
regulations governing compulsory service -- the institution of slavery
and the like -- are always framed, not in the interests of the worker, but
in the interests of those who impose his work upon him. The
regulations governing exchange and barter in the marriage market,
therefore, are necessarily framed in the interests of the employer -- the

male.
The position is this. Marriage, with its accompaniments and
consequences -- the ordering of a