(1) The Wage-Earner
“And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend,
That all is done in reverent care of her;
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night;
And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
The Taming of the Shrew, IV. i.

The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course, very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force.

It is difficult to believe in the intellectual honesty of those feminists who declare that women must[70] fight men on an equality in the economic world. I have read articles insisting that women must not only bear the child, but make provision for the child, unaided by men, either individually or collectively. Such proposals depend on the evolution of a race of Superwomen unlike any the world has seen, and no one has demonstrated, or even suggested, how such a race is to be formed. The women who dream these dreams are very attractive visionaries, but I do not propose to follow them into their Utopia, for the reason that I am more interested in the world of reality. In this world of reality, we must face the fact that women, for every child they bear in health and strength, are made less capable of producing exchange value (called wealth), and that not only motherhood, but potential motherhood, affects and always will affect the market value of a woman’s work. The people who do not admit this are exceedingly few; but those who do admit it are sharply divided in their views as to how the resultant evils are to be met, and even those who believe most earnestly in the women’s movement, differ in their solutions of the economic problem. Yet the economic slavery of women is worse and more difficult to deal with than any other slavery, and it cannot be met by machinery only; it must be met by a change of heart, a change as needful in women themselves as in men. Women must have pride and belief in themselves and their work, and men must leave off applying to women a cash standard wholly inappropriate[71] to that part of the community whose work is so largely work for the future.

I have preferred to begin with this statement of the women’s economic handicap, because I find the great and ineluctable weight of it more often under-rated by women in the movement than by those I have called reactionaries. The queer thing is, that the reactionaries who make such play with the burden of woman, are those who propose to pile on to the necessary burden of the child the totally unnecessary additional burdens of ignorance and lack of training, and a thousand restrictions of law and custom, while still making no serious attempt to remove all necessity for earning. Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast, one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free.

Women are notoriously paid less than men, and the reactionaries are very fond of giving us a somewhat superfluous lesson in elementary economics, to account for these lower wages. They say that wages depend on the demand for, and supply of, labour, and that these depend on the amount of skill required, the pleasantness and healthiness of the work, the amount and the cost of training for[72] it, and so forth. They say that women’s work is less efficient than men’s, partly on account of their essential inferiority (one instance of this being their greater liability to sickness), and partly because of their expectation of matrimony, which makes their work less constant and makes their parents less willing to expend money in training them. Finally, they say that women have other sources of income than their labour, and that their wages being supplemented from these sources, they are able and willing to take lower wages than men, able and willing in many cases to accept wages upon which one woman cannot live. These sources are twofold: their male relations partly keep them, so that their wage is only a pocket-money wage; or other men partly keep them, in return for their favours.

With the exception of the somewhat sweeping assertions about the essential inferiority of women’s work, I am prepared to admit all these statements as being manifestly in accordance with facts as they are. This does not increase my enthusiasm for facts as they are; on the contrary, it makes me cast about for means of changing them, and some of them seem to be already in course of rapid change. As for the greater incidence of sickness among women making their work less valuable, it would be interesting to inquire how much of that sickness is due to the low standard of living, caused by low wages: by overwork from having to do housework and needlework when the day’s wage-work is done, by poor food, lack of rational pleasures, and the[73] depression of knowing that, however hard they work, there is no future before them; a woman cannot rise. There is another cause of depression, in the nature of the “dependents” a woman generally has. A man’s “dependents” mostly include a wife, who nurses and looks after him, and children, in whom he can have hope and pride. A woman’s dependents are the crippled husband, the old mother, the invalid sister for whom there is no hope. When a woman falls sick, there is frequently no one to g............