(9) The servant functions of preparing food and removing dirt are not necessarily domestic functions, and could be better performed by professional cooks outside the home, and professional cleaners visiting the home or taking the work from the home.
(10) The nursemaid functions of minding small children can be better performed, with greater advantage to the children, in the crêche and kindergarten than in the domestic nursery.
(11) The wife can therefore advantageously be relieved from the continuous supervision of the kitchen, the living rooms, and the nursery, as she has already been relieved of the burden of the family washing, dressmaking, tailoring, and manufacture of underclothing.
(12) She will then be free to earn her own living outside the home.
(13) By so doing she not only will prevent the evils which have arisen from the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, but she will develop her human faculties. For what we do modifies us more than what is done for us.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh propositions are those on which the whole argument hinges. Mrs. Stetson’s energy of expression and her contempt for convention have deservedly secured for her a re-consideration of old problems thus presented in a new form. The ability with which she supports her conclusions is obvious. Her logic needs more careful examination.
Her first argument I dismiss as quite irrelevant. Granted that at least some men support their female kind, and that no brutes do, nothing follows. I trust that there are many thousand characteristics which may be predicated of man which must be denied of brutes.
Granted also her next argument, that what the wife obtains from her husband bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood. Marriage, as Mrs. Stetson maintains, should not be a business transaction, and therefore the less commercial the relations of husband and wife to each other, the less will service on one side be balanced against service on the other side. The basis is the reverse of the economic basis; the honest business man tries to get the largest amount for himself obtainable without cheating his co-bargainer, trusting to the latter to guard his own interests, and to see that what he gets is worth to him what he gives for it. In any normal marriage the desire on each side is to secure to the other the greatest amount of good at a reasonable cost to themselves, the difference between persons determining more than anything else what they consider a reasonable cost. Stepniak, in a struggle with the English language, once gave a very happy definition, which most practical people would accept. “Marriage,” he said, “is to love and put up with.” Now these are just the two acts that no one expects from the parties to a commercial contract.
I therefore grant Mrs. Stetson’s second argument, and put it aside, as being, like the previous one, beside the question.
Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment the question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says, for a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the face of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really possess, or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly which she at heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the human qualities of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated, rather than the development of feminine attraction.