referring recently to this fact before an audience almost
equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every
woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more
than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were
dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining
that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a
different relation to the family money, all the women raised their
hands except three and they all had private property.

Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have
transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside
to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they
were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to
them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the
money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband
collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study
of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel
how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil
influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and
through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services
and wages in general.[32]

[32] CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, _Woman and Economics_, Boston: Small,
Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, _Woman and Labor_, by OLIVE SCHREINER,
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.

Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person
without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements
that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into
money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could
be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give.
Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she
tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it
to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and
this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must
have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside
obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual
property for their realization.

In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the
property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our
pu