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Page 25
[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
public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into
it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family
expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property
acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held
in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution,
not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property
gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife
dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family
property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside
agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may
order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party,
according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the
man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one
will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be
economically equal.
VI
Women in Industry
In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly
effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.
Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined
to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to
sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned;
getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely
running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or
die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests,
laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young,
a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not
immediately productive of pleasure.
This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With
bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an
asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants
compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be
individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of
strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of
food and protection with less than their share of effort.
From the first, some division of work between male and female grows
almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.
Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female
to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to
do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he
generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she
protects and provisions it.
Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been
very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than
males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of
cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep
the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be
true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than
the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and
oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a
consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the
daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally
smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved;
and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our
daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable,
because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among
domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work,
multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
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