The specialization going on in industry means infinite variety if we look at the whole field of activity. Some parts of the world's work are specially fitted for men; other parts to women. No intelligent division of labor has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the dressmaking, and women should make men's clothing, but no intelligent man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will be little or no industrial competition between men and women.
It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their deepest supplementary values. Sex antagonism can do much to impoverish and ruin individual lives; but the monogamic and persistent union of lovers, surrounded by their children, will easily survive all the mistakes of a time of transition. In the meantime, those who would uphold the finest family ideals of the past have less cause to fear the militant agitator than they have to fear the idle, parasitic wife, who relies on her legal rights to give her luxuries without labor, position without leadership, and wifehood without the care and responsibility of children.
From the point of view of this book, all the efforts to open the doors of opportunity, through which women can pass into the man's world, are but preparations for the beginning of a journey. The sooner all such doors are opened the better, for then a great source of dangerous sex antagonism will pass away; and the energy of reformers will be set free to work out the difficult problem of supplementary sex adjustments.
And meantime, sex remains the greatest mystery and the most powerful thing in human life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when men and women are warring over work, wages, and votes, just as the meaning of religion has been lost when priests and laity sought to advance their meanly selfish interests. But in the crises of life it always comes back. When a great ship founders in midocean, and but a third of the people can be saved, there is then no question of woman's rights. In the darkness of early morning, eager men's hands place their women in the life-boats and push them off. The poorest peasant woman takes precedence over any man. Almost every woman there would prefer to stay and die with her man; would glory in staying and dying if he might thus be saved; but in her keeping are the generations of the future, and she is weak, therefore the strong gladly stand back and go down to death. The solution of woman's place in the society of the future must be based on a recognition of the supplementary forces that send women to undesired safety while men die.