A further important issue is that when rendered too easy by both husband and wife earning wage, marriage is entered upon far too lightly, and at too early and irresponsible ages, than happens when the whole burden of support rests with the man. Moreover, in such case masculine selection makes only too often for economic rather than for human values in the wife. A man upon whom is to fall the whole tax of supporting the home and the family regards marriage more seriously, and delays it until he is more mature of years and of settled position. Moreover, he chooses more carefully. And the Race benefits proportionally.
In manufacturing towns, with opportunity for both husband and wife earning wage, boy-and-girl marriages, feckless, discordant homes, and sickly degenerate, neglected children are the rule.
That women should be paid for work they do, a salary enabling them to live honestly and in comfort, goes without saying. Economics should be adjusted on a far higher basis than that mainly of a competitive struggle which allows the employer to fix wages less according to the value of work done, than by the number of persons at his mercy, who, in their eagerness to live, will undersell their values and thus cheapen labour. Nevertheless economics have, in a degree, adapted to the evolutionary trend. Because, in the main, the more skilled and difficult tasks are more highly remunerated than the less skilled, and are performed by the more fit. And not only are these better qualified to expend such higher remuneration intelligently, and with benefit to themselves and to the community, but they are able to secure thereby those better conditions which are the due and the need of families higher in the scale of humanity, and requiring, therefore, higher conditions of nurture.
The cases of colliers and of other rough-grade humans who earn wage beyond their mental calibre to expend intelligently, show how an income too large for its possessor leads to coarse and demoralising extravagances, rather than to personal happiness or elevation. (The like is true of many plutocrats.) War has shown us boys' lives wrecked by the same factor. No greater fallacy exists than that of supposing progress to lie in freeing persons from all disabilities—poverty, and other restrictive conditions.
Wives should be legally entitled to a just proportion of their husband's income, as a right, not merely as dole. This, in recognition of their invaluable work in home-making, and of their invaluable service to the State in producing and rearing worthy citizens for it.
VI
Masculine legislation, making all the while, in the face of economic difficulties, for the ever further release of women and children from the more laborious and debasing tasks, has made compulsory, in their own and in the interests of their unborn infants, a month of respite for expectant mothers, and a further month for mothers after delivery. Extending thus to these poor victims—beasts of the burden of toil, and beasts of the burden of sex—a mercy and consideration wholly lacking in the Feminist propaganda. For this latter repudiates indignantly all need for concession or privilege to wifehood or to motherhood, equally with womanhood.
To justify the claim for equality in all things, women must be forced, at all cost, to identical standards of work and production. To ask privileges and concessions would be to confess, in the sex, weaknesses and disabilities that must disqualify it from economic identity with the other.
Far, indeed, from such vain-glorious and disastrous straining for equality, the leaders of the Woman's Movement should, before all else, have demanded insistently still further industrial concessions and privileges for a sex handicapped for industry, by Nature. First and foremost, they should come into the open and boldly proclaim—what it is useless to deny, indeed—that in the function of parenthood, at all events, men and women are wholly dissimilar. They should reject outright all tinkerings and half-measures for relief of this great human disability, whereof one sex only bears the stress and burden for the benefit of both, and for survival of nations and races.