That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home has been the prevalent American ideal from the landing of the Mayflower right down to the leader writing of Mr. Arthur Brisbane.  And it is clear that a very considerable section among one’s educated women contemporaries do not mean to stand this ideal any longer.  They do not want to be owned and cherished, and they do not want to be revered.  How far they represent their sex in this matter it is very hard to say.  In England in the professional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that all the most able women below five-and-thirty are workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and independent citizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which women live to-day.  It is at least plausible to suppose that a day is approaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic dependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, and upon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will no longer be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, and when, with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will be prepared to exert themselves as a class to modify this situation.  It may be that this is incorrect, and that in devotion to an accepted male and his children most women do still and will continue to find their greatest satisfaction in life.  But it is the writer’s impression that so simple and single-hearted a devotion is rare, and that, released from tradition—­and education, reading and discussion do mean release from tradition—­women are as eager for initiative, freedom and experience as men.  In that case they will persist in the present agitation for political rights, and these secured, go on to demand a very considerable reconstruction of our present social order.

It is interesting to point the direction in which this desire for independence will probably take them.  They will discover that the dependence of women at the present time is not so much a law-made as an economic dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex imposes upon them.  Maternity and the concomitants of maternity are the circumstances in their lives, exhausting energy and earning nothing, that place them at a discount.  From the stage when property ceased to be chiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the so-called primitive matriarchate) to our present stage, women have had to depend upon a man’s willingness to keep them, in order to realise the organic purpose of their being.  Whether conventionally equal or not, whether voters or not, that necessity for dependence will still remain under our system of private property and free independent competition.  There is only one evident way by which women as a class can escape from that dependence each upon an individual man and from all the practical inferiority this dependence entails, and that is by so altering their status as to make maternity and the upbringing of children a charge not upon the husband of the mother but upon the community.  The public Endowment of Maternity is the only route by which the mass of women can reach that personal freedom and independent citizenship so many of them desire.