of things will cease to prevail.

In the trades, English Feminists resent the fact that women are excluded
from the law, generally speaking, the ministry, the higher ranks of
business and of the Civil Service and so forth, and practically from
hospital appointments; also that women are paid low wages for work
similar to that of men.

They complain too that the home demands of woman too great an
expenditure of energy, too much time, too much labor; that the
concentration of her mind upon the continual purchasing and cooking of
food, on cleaning, on the care of the child, is unnecessarily developed;
they doubt if the home can be maintained as it is if woman is to develop
as a free personality.

With marriage, lastly, they are perhaps most concerned. Though they are
not in the main prepared to advocate free union, they are emphatically
arrayed against modern marriage, which they look upon as slave union.
The somewhat ridiculous modifications of the marriage service introduced
by a few couples in America and by one in England, in which the word
"obey" was deleted from the bride's pledge, can be taken as indicative
of the Feminist attitude. Their grievances against the home, against the
treatment of women in the trades, are closely connected with the
marriage question, for they believe that the desire of man to have a
housekeeper, of woman to have a protector, deeply influence the
complexion of unions which they would base exclusively upon love, and it
follows that they do not accept as effective marriage any union where
the attitudes of love do not exist. For them who favor absolute
equality, partnership, sharing of responsibilities and privileges,
modern marriage represents a condition of sex-slavery into which woman
is frequently compelled to enter because she needs to live, and in which
she must often remain, however abominable the conditions under which the
union is maintained, because man, master of the purse, is master of the
woman.

Generally, then, the Feminists are in opposition to most of the world
institutions. For them the universe is based upon the subjection of
woman: subjection by law, and subjection by convention. Before
considering what modifications the Feminists wish to introduce into the
social system, a few words must be said as to this distinction between
convention and the law.

2

Convention, which is nothing but petrified habit, has lain upon woman
perhaps more heavily than any law, for th