hough at present unavoidable devices to be presently
merged in and superseded by the broad and scientific previsions of the
co-operative commonwealth.

3.9. THE CASE OF THE WIFE AND MOTHER.

These principles give a rule also for the problem that faces the great
majority of thinking wives and mothers to-day. The most urgent and
necessary social work falls upon them; they bear, and largely educate
and order the homes of, the next generation, and they have no direct
recognition from the community for either of these supreme functions.
They are supposed to perform them not for God or the world, but to
please and satisfy a particular man. Our laws, our social conventions,
our economic methods, so hem a woman about that, however fitted for and
desirous of maternity she may be, she can only effectually do that
duty in a dependent relation to her husband. Nearly always he is the
paymaster, and if his payments are grudging or irregular, she has
little remedy short of a breach and the rupture of the home. Her duty
is conceived of as first to him and only secondarily to her children and
the State. Many wives become under these circumstances mere prostitutes
to their husbands, often evading the bearing of children with their
consent and even at their request, and "loving for a living." That is a
natural outcome of the proprietary theory of the family out of which our
civilization emerges. But our modern ideas trend more and more to regard
a woman's primary duty to be her duty to the children and to the world
to which she gives them. She is to be a citizen side by side with her
husband; no longer is he to intervene between her and the community. As
a matter of contemporary fact he can do so and does so habitually, and
most women have to square their ideas of life to that possibility.

Before any woman who is clear-headed enough to perceive that this great
business of motherhood is one of supreme public importance, there are a
number of alternatives at the present time. She may, like Grant Allan's
heroine in "The Woman Who Did," declare an exaggerated and impossible
independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and bear children to a
lover. This, in the present state of public opinion in almost every
existing social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It
would mean a fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the
double part of income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling
home. It would