Chapter I.

Since we have learned to study the development of human life as we study the evolution of species throughout the animal kingdom, some peculiar phenomena which have puzzled the philosopher and moralist for so long, begin to show themselves in a new light.  We begin to see that, so far from being inscrutable problems, these sorrows and perplexities of our lives are but the natural results of natural causes, and, that, as soon as we ascertain the causes, we can do much to remove them.

In spite of the power of the individual will to struggle against conditions, to resist them for a while, and sometimes to overcome them, it remains true that the human creature is affected by his environment, as is every other living thing.

Without touching yet upon the influence of social factors, treating the human being merely as an individual animal, we see that we are modified most by our economic conditions, as is every other animal.  The sheep, the cow, the deer, differ in their adaptation to the weather, their locomotive ability, their means of defense; but they agree in main characteristics, because of their common method of nutrition.

The human animal is no exception to this rule.  Climate affects us, weather affects us, enemies affect us; but most of all we are affected, like every other living creature, by what we do for a living.

In view of these facts, attention is now called to a certain marked and peculiar economic condition affecting humans, and unparalleled in the organic world.  We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relations is also an economic relation. With us an entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is combined with the sex-relation.  The economic status of the human female is relative to the sex-relation.

It is commonly assumed that this condition also obtains among other animals, but such is not the case.

In the human species the condition is permanent and general, though there are exceptions, and the present century is witnessing the beginnings of a great change in this respect.

In studying the economic position of the sexes collectively, the difference is most marked.  As a social animal, the economic status of man rests on the combined and exchanged services of vast numbers of progressively specialized individuals. The economic progress of the race, its maintenance at any period, its continued advanced, involve the collective activities of all the trades, crafts, arts, manufactures, inventions, discoveries, and all the civil and military institutions that go to maintain them. The economic status of any race at any time, with its involved effect on all the constituent individuals, depends on their world-wide labors and their free exchange.  Economic progress, however, is almost exclusively masculine. Such economic processes as women have been allowed to exercise are of the earliest and most primitive kind. Were men to perform no economic services save such as are still performed by women, our racial status in economics would be reduced to most painful limitations.

To take from any community its male workers would paralyze it economically to a far greater degree than to remove its female workers.  Men can cook, clean, and sew as well as women; but the making and managing of the great engines of modern industry, the threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of transportation, the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade, commerce, government – these things could not be done so well by women in their present degree of economic development.

This is not owing to lack of the essential human faculties necessary to such achievements, nor to any inherent disability of sex, but to the present condition of women, forbidding the development of this degree of economic ability.  The male human being is thousands of years in advance of the female in economic status. Speaking collectively, men produce and distribute wealth; and women receive it at their heads.

The economic status of the human race in any nation, at any time, is governed mainly by the activities of the male: the female obtains her share in the racial advances only through him.

Women consume economic good.  What economic product do they give in exchange for what they consume?  In what way does she earn from her husband the food, clothing, and shelter she receives at his hands?  By house service, it will be instantly replied.  Although not producers of wealth, women serve in the final processes of preparation and distribution.  Their labor in the household has a genuine economic value.

For a certain percentage of persons to serve other persons, in order that the ones so served may produce more, is a contribution not to be overlooked. The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society.  But so are horses.  The labor of horses enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could. The horse is an economic factor in society.  But the horse is not economically independent, nor is the woman.

The labor which the wife performs in the household is given as part of her functional duty, not as employment.  To take this ground and hold it honestly, wives, as earners through domestic service, are entitled to the wages of cooks, housemaids, nursemaids, seamstresses, or housekeepers, and to no more.  This would of course reduce the spending money of the wives of the rich, and put it out of the power of the poor man to ‘support’ a wife at all. Nowhere on earth would there be “a rich woman” by these means.  Even the highest class of private housekeeper, useful as her services are, does not accumulate a fortune.

But the salient fact in this discussion is that, whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it.  The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.

Without going into either the ethics or the necessities of the case, we have reached so much common ground: the female of the human species is supported by the male.  Whereas, in other species of animals, male and female alike graze and browse, hunt and kill, climb, swim, dig, run, and fly for their livings, in our species the female does not seek her own living in the specific activities of our race, but is fed by the male.

Now to the alleged necessity.  Because of her maternal duties, the human female is said to be unable to get her own living.  As the maternal duties of other females do not unfit them for getting their own living and also the livings of their young, it would seem that the human maternal duties require the segregation of the entire energies of the mother to the service of the child during her entire adult life, or so large a proportion of them that not enough remains to devote to the individual interests of the mother.

Such a condition, did it exist, would of course excuse and justify the pitiful development of the human female, and her support by the male.  Is this the condition of human motherhood? Does the human mother, by her motherhood, thereby lose control of brain and body, lose power and skill and desire for any other work?  Do we see before us the human race, with all its females segregated entirely to the uses of motherhood, consecrated, set apart, specially developed, spending every power of their nature on the service of their children?

We do not.  We see the human mother worked far harder than a mare, laboring her life long in the service, not of her children only, but of men: husbands, brothers, fathers, whatever male relative she has; for mother and sister also; for the church a little, if she is allowed; for society, if she is able; for charity and education and reform, – working in many ways that are not the ways of motherhood.

In spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties, the human female, the world over, works at extra-maternal duties for hours enough to provide her with an independent living, and then is denied independence on the ground that motherhood prevents her working!

The working power of the mother has always been a prominent factor in human life.  She is the worker par excellence, but her work is not such as to affect her economic status.  Her living, all that she gets – food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries – these bear no relation to her power to produce wealth, to her services in the house, or to her motherhood.  These things bear relation only to the man she marries, the man she depends on, – to how much he has and how much he is willing to give her.  The female of the human species is economically dependent on the male.  He is her food supply.