Woman and Labour | Page 4

and it was mainly from this chapter that this
book was drawn. The question of the parasitism of woman is, I think,
very vital, very important; it explains many phenomena which nothing
else explains; and it will be of increasing importance. But for the
moment there are other aspects of woman's relation to labour
practically quite as pressing. In the larger book I had devoted one
chapter entirely to an examination of the work woman has done and
still does in the modern world, and the gigantic evils which arise from
the fact that her labour, especially domestic labour, often the most
wearisome and unending known to any section of the human race, is
not adequately recognised or recompensed. Especially on this point I
have feared this book might lead to a misconception, if by its great
insistence on the problem of sex parasitism, and the lighter dealing with
other aspects, it should lead to the impression that woman's domestic
labour at the present day (something quite distinct from, though

indirectly connected with, the sexual relation between man and woman)
should not be highly and most highly recognised and recompensed. I
believe it will be in the future, and then when woman gives up her
independent field of labour for domestic or marital duty of any kind,
she will not receive her share of the earnings of the man as a more or
less eleemosynary benefaction, placing her in a position of subjection,
but an equal share, as the fair division, in an equal partnership. (It may
be objected that where a man and woman have valued each other
sufficiently to select one another from all other humans for a lifelong
physical union, it is an impertinence to suppose there could be any
necessity to adjust economic relations. In love there is no first nor last!
And that the desire of each must be to excel the other in service.
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.
The fact that for equal work equally well performed by a man and by a
woman, it is ordained that the woman on the ground of her sex alone
shall receive a less recompense, is the nearest approach to a wilful and
unqualified "wrong" in the whole relation of woman to society today.
That males of enlightenment and equity can for an hour tolerate the
existence of this inequality has seemed to me always incomprehensible;
and it is only explainable when one regards it as a result of the blinding
effects of custom and habit. Personally, I have felt so profoundly on
this subject, that this, with one other point connected with woman's
sexual relation to man, are the only matters connected with woman's
position, in