mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most
cases, and even assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on
all fours with that immediate abandonment of private property we have
already discussed, a sort of suicide that helps the world nothing.

Or she may "strike," refuse marriage and pursue a solitary and childless
career, engaging her surplus energies in constructive work. But that
also is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experiences, the finest
realities life has to offer.

Or she may meet a man whom she can trust to keep a treaty with her and
supplement the common interpretations and legal insufficiencies of the
marriage bond, who will respect her always as a free and independent
person, will abstain absolutely from authoritative methods, and will
either share and trust his income and property with her in a frank
communism, or give her a sufficient and private income for her personal
use. It is only fair under existing economic conditions that at marriage
a husband should insure his life in his wife's interest, and I do not
think it would be impossible to bring our legal marriage contract into
accordance with modern ideas in that matter. Certainly it should be
legally imperative that at the birth of each child a new policy upon its
father's life, as the income-getter, should begin. The latter provision
at least should be a normal condition of marriage and one that the
wife should have power to enforce when payments fall away. With such
safeguards and under such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard
dependence for a woman, and she may live, teaching and rearing and free,
almost as though the co-operative commonwealth had come.

But in many cases, since great numbers of women marry so young and
so ignorantly that their thinking about realities begins only after
marriage, a woman will find herself already married to a man before she
realizes the significance of these things. She may be already the mother
of children. Her husband's ideas may not be her ideas. He may dominate,
he may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. He may, if he sees
fit, burthen the family income with the charges of his illegitimate
offspring.

We live in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. That
sentence becomes the refrain of this discussion.

The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position,
to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though she was under
th