nto its ranks,[300] and made
inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman
the possession of her own earnings. The same movement, with its same
consequences, is going on elsewhere. In the United States, just as in
England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing,
who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers
is even better than in England. In France from twenty-five to seventy-five
per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries--the liberal
professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries--are women, and in
some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries,
more women are employed than men. In Japan, it is said, three-fifths of
the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the
hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern
conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal
responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to
take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered
the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of
feminine innocence shrouded from the world a mere piece of false
sentiment.[302]

There can be no doubt that the entrance of women into the field
of industrial work, in rivalry with men and under somewhat the
same conditions as men, raises serious questions of another
order. The general tendency of civilization towards the economic
independence and the moral responsibility of women is
unquestionable. But it is by no means absolutely clear that it is
best for women, and, therefore, for the community, that women
should exercise all the ordinary avocations and professions of
men on the same level as men. Not only have the conditions of the
avocations and professions developed in accordance with the
special aptitudes of men, but the fact that the sexual processes
by which the race is propagated demand an incomparably greater
expenditure of time and energy on the part of women than of men,
precludes women in the mass from devoting themselves so
exclusively as men to industrial work. For some biologists,
indeed, it seems clear that outside the home and the school women
should not work at all. "Any nation that works its women is
damned," says Woods Hutchinson (_The Gospel According to Darwin_,
p.