here are a larger number who are
helpless and have never been trained to be anything else but helpless,
even by their wives, who would often detest a rival in household work and
management. The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is
usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation
that make it enjoyable. He cannot keep it in order and cleanliness and
regulated movement, he seldom knows how to buy the things that are needed
for its upkeep, nor how to prepare and cook and present a decent meal; he
cannot even attend to his own domestic needs. It is the wife's consolation
that most husbands are not always at home.

"In ministering to the wants of the family, the woman has reduced man to a
state of considerable dependency on her in all domestic affairs, just as
she is dependent on him for bodily protection. In the course of ages this
has gone so far as to foster a peculiar helplessness on the part of the
man, which manifests itself in a somewhat childlike reliance of the
husband on the wife. In fact it may be said that the husband is, to all
intents and purposes, incapable of maintaining himself without the aid of
a woman." This passage will probably seem to many readers to apply quite
fairly well to men as they exist to-day in most of those lands which we
consider at the summit of our civilisation. Yet it was not written of
civilisation, or of white men, but of the Bantu tribes of East
Africa,[14] complete Negroes who, while far from being among the lowest
savages, belong to a culture which is only just emerging from cannibalism,
witchcraft, and customary bloodshed. So close a resemblance between the
European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
status during a vast period of the world's history.

[14] Hon. C. Dundas, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol.
45, 1915, p. 302.

It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife