tirely
to an examination of the work woman has done and still does in the
modern world, and the gigantic evils which arise from the fact that
her labour, especially domestic labour, often the most wearisome and
unending known to any section of the human race, is not adequately
recognised or recompensed. Especially on this point I have feared this
book might lead to a misconception, if by its great insistence on the
problem of sex parasitism, and the lighter dealing with other aspects,
it should lead to the impression that woman's domestic labour at the
present day (something quite distinct from, though indirectly connected
with, the sexual relation between man and woman) should not be highly
and most highly recognised and recompensed. I believe it will be in the
future, and then when woman gives up her independent field of labour for
domestic or marital duty of any kind, she will not receive her share
of the earnings of the man as a more or less eleemosynary benefaction,
placing her in a position of subjection, but an equal share, as the fair
division, in an equal partnership. (It may be objected that where a man
and woman have valued each other sufficiently to select one another from
all other humans for a lifelong physical union, it is an impertinence
to suppose there could be any necessity to adjust economic relations. In
love there is no first nor last! And that the desire of each must be to
excel the other in service. That this should be so is true; that it is
so now, in the case of union between two perfectly morally developed
humans, is also true, and that this condition may in a distant future be
almost universal is certainly true. But dealing with this matter as a
practical question today, we have to consider not what should be, or
what may be, but what, given traditions and institutions of our
societies, is, today.) Especially I have feared that the points dealt
with in this little book, when taken apart from other aspects of the
question, might lead to the conception that it was intended to express
the thought, that it was possible or desirable that woman in addition to
her child-bearing should take from man his share in the support and care
of his offspring or of the woman who fulfilled with regard to himself
domestic duties of any kind. In that chapter in the original book
devoted to the consideration of man's labour in connection with woman
and with his offspring more than one hundred pages were devoted to