s of
labour with men, which have hitherto been apportioned to them alone, the
nature and strength of the sympathy arising from common labours will be
increasingly clear.

The sharing by men and women of the same labours, necessitating a common
culture and therefore common habits of thought and interests, would
tend to fill that painful hiatus which arises so continually in modern
conjugal life, dividing the man and woman as soon as the first sheen of
physical sexual attraction which glints only over the unknown begins to
fade, and from which springs so large a part of the tragedy of modern
conjugal relations. The primitive male might discuss with her his
success in hunting and her success in finding roots; as the primitive
peasant may discuss today with his wife the crops and cows in which both
are equally interested and which both understand; there is nothing in
their order of life to produce always increasingly divergent habits of
thought and interest.

In modern civilised life, in many sections, the lack of any common
labour and interests and the wide dissimilarity of the life led by the
man and the woman, tend continually to produce increasing divergence; so
that, long before middle life is reached, they are left without any
bond of co-cohesion but that of habit. The comradeship and continual
stimulation, rising from intercourse with those sharing our closest
interests and regarding life from the same standpoint, the man tends to
seek in his club and among his male companions, and the woman accepts
solitude, or seeks dissipations which tend yet farther to disrupt the
common conjugal life. A certain mental camaraderie and community of
impersonal interests is imperative in conjugal life in addition to a
purely sexual relation, if the union is to remain a living and always
growing reality. It is more especially because the sharing by woman of
the labours of man will tend to promote camaraderie and the existence of
common, impersonal interests and like habits of thought and life, that
the entrance of women into the very fields shared by men, and not into
others peculiarly reserved for her, is so desirable. (The reply once
given by the wife of a leading barrister, when reference was made to the
fact that she and her husband were seldom found in each other's society,
throws a painful but true light on certain aspects of modern life,
against which the entire woman's movement of our age is a rebellion.
"My husband," she s