s of remuneration offered
to women for work when compared with men? Thousands of women and girls
receive wages that are insufficient to support life. They do not die,
they live; but how? The answer is plain. Woman possesses a marketable
value attached to her personality which man has not got. This enables
her to live, if she has children, to feed them, and also not
infrequently to support the man, forced out of work by the lowness of
the wages she can accept. The woman's sex is a saleable thing.
Prostitution is the door of escape freely opened to all women. It is
because of the reserve fund thus established that their honest wages
suffer. Not all sweated women are prostitutes. Many are legally
married, they exist somehow; but the wages of all women are
conditioned by this sexual resource. It can be readily seen that this
is a survival of the patriarchal idea of the property value of woman.
To-day it affords a striking example of the conflict between the old
rights of men with the rising power of women. The value of woman is
her sexual value; her value as a worker is as yet unrecognised, except
as a secondary matter. You may refuse to be convinced of this. Yet the
fact remains that our society is so organised that women are more
highly paid and better treated as prostitutes than they are as honest
workers.

I shall say no more on this question here, as I propose to deal with
prostitution more fully in a later chapter. I would, however, point
out that what I have said in no way implies an opinion that women
should be driven out of the labour market. This is as unfair as that
they should be driven into it. It is the conditions of labour that
must be changed. I am not even able to accept the opinion that the
strength of woman is necessarily less than that of man, only that it
is different. It is, in fact, just this difference that is so
important. If woman's capacity in work was the same as men's no great
advantage could arise from women's entrance into the work of the
State. It might well lead to even worse confusion. It is the special
qualities that belong to woman that humanity is waiting for. Just as
at the dawn of civilisation society was moulded and in great measure
built up by women, then probably unconscious of their power and the
end it made towards, so, in the future, our society will be carried on
and humanised by women, deliberately working for the race, their
creative energy having become self-conscious and or