dominance.
Yet in those days the working housewife commanded the consideration
always conceded to a bread-winner--even when dependent. In modern
times women's economic position has been undermined by the helpless
dependence engendered amongst the well-to-do by "parasitism" resulting
from nineteenth-century luxury--to quote the striking word of Olive
Schreiner. Similarly, dependence has been forced upon large sections
of women-folk amongst the manual workers by the loss of their hold
upon land and by the decay of home industries. Now a new force is at
work: the revolt of the modern woman against parasitism and dependence
in all their forms; her demand for freedom to work and to choose her
sphere of work, as well as for the right to dispose of what she gains.

Six years ago some women of the Fabian Society, deeply stirred by the
tremendous social import of this movement, banded themselves together
to unravel the tangled skein of women's economic subjection and to
discover how its knots were tied. The first step was to get women to
speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances as matters
boldly to be faced. Whatever the truth may turn out to be with regard
to natural and inevitable differences of faculty between men and
women, it is at least certain that difference of sex, like any other
persistent condition of individual existence, implies some difference
of outlook. The woman's own standpoint--that is the first essential in
understanding her position, economic or other: the trouble is that
she has but recently begun to realise that she inevitably has a
standpoint, which is not that of her husband, or her brother, or of
the men with whom she works, or even that which these persons imagine
must naturally be hers. Her point of view is her own, and it is
essential to social progress that she shall both recognise this fact
and make it understood.

The aim of the Fabian Women's Group was to elicit women's own thoughts
and feelings on their economic position, and to this end we invited
women of experience and expert knowledge, from various quarters and
of many types of thought, to discourse of what they best knew to
audiences of women. After the lectures, the questions raised were
discussed in all their bearings by women speaking amongst women
without diffidence or prejudice. In this manner the physical
disabilities of women as workers have been explained clearly by women
doctors, and carefully and frankly weigh