An Equal Partnership.
The New York Sun does not agree with Mr. Scudder. In the course of an editorial on the subject it says:
It may be remarked that nobody who enters into a partnership of any sort can expect to retain absolute personal freedom. The rule is equally true in business and marriage. The attempt to exercise absolute personal freedom by one or both partners is pretty sure to result in disaster to any enterprise of any description.
But this is not the main point. Mr. Scudder's most serious fallacy lies in the notion that in any healthy marriage relation the woman is non-self-supporting and the mere "beneficiary of man." The proposition is as absurd as it would be to say that the member of a law firm who pleads in the courts is a mere tender, a mere appendage, a mere beneficiary of the gentleman who sits in the office, sees the clients, and collects the bills, or that the expert engineer at the head of a steel plant is a mere tender to the man who manages the finances of the concern.
Nobody earns his or her livelihood more honorably or more directly than the wife and mother of a family who does her duty. She is her husband's business partner in a phase of his life which is at least as vital to his interests as the outside one by which he makes his money under the eye of the world. If the couple are partners in a poor and struggling concern, the wife contributes as much to the general success by the work of her hands as the man does by his; if they are more fortunate, and prosperous, the woman's busy brain contriving and ruling in the household is earning by earnest, eager, expert, and honorable exertion as good a livelihood as the husband is able to provide her with.
The law holds good in the realms of wealth and luxury. The woman who creates and maintains an eminent social position for her family is likely to be her husband's most important ally, and her share of all the benefits that they enjoy in common is not a mere gratuity; it does not come to her from her husband's bounty; it is her compensation for the services she does in advancing the interests of the alliance.