ce of women. Each sex is to work
for itself, and then there need be no more quarrelling.

But we could not go even so far with any theory for making men
independent of women without seeing that we were no less wrong on that
side than Mrs. Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic
independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected
economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to
realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that
unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction
of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse
thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid
itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is
literally the law of the house or the home--where life begins. Of all
economies, life is the last judge, because there is no wealth but life.
_In the last resort the economic dependence of the sexes means nothing
because the sexes cannot independently reproduce themselves._

If Mrs. Gilman is to be arraigned for her error let us see to it most
carefully that we do not fail to arraign the men who, with not
one-thousandth part of her excuse and with no iota of her ability, fall
into the corresponding error on their side. When Women's Suffrage is
being debated, there never fails a supply of men who write to the papers
to say that men must vote and not women because men and not women "made
the State." How much simpler our problems would be if there were some
means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type,
and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the
State, indeed!--they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and
without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of
course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet
created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is
the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that
women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course
reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is
unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be
economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals
distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex
vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run
the earth alone till Halley'